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I understand why CentOS/RHEL is preferred by some server admins to Ubuntu (longer support cycles, hardware drivers etc), but I never got why individual devs run CentOS versus Ubuntu on their own machines.

Every time I have tried to get tech stacks up and running on CentOS, there is just more friction/pain than doing the equivalent with Ubuntu LTS.

Am I missing something?

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I mean, you said it yourself. I run a CentOS development machine because what I write will eventually deploy on a CentOS / RHEL server.

For me it's pretty much all package management:

- I like that all the packaging stuff is done by a single command (yum, or more recently dnf).

- I find RHEL derivatives' packaging conventions easier to deal with than Debian derivatives' (<thing>, <thing>-dev, lib<thing> etc. isn't always consistent on Debian derivatives).

- EPEL gives me most of the packages I need and I don't have issues with them being dated as often as Ubuntu LTS.

- RHEL derivatives' don't tend to do weird nonsense like messing with nginx configuration layout to match Apache.

Because odds are, you'll need to deploy onto CentOS if you sell your product to someone else.

Also, I like yum's cli more than apt-get's (less than pacman's though)

Group #2 (users/desktop users/developers) runs CentOS because of Group #1 (server admins/agencies). I'm sure you could find some if you looked, but I've never met anyone except RH employees who actively preferred CentOS/RHEL for personal usage.

If you're deploying to physical hardware, most enterprise-y drivers and tools are only provided in RPM format by the vendors.

That, and I've had much better luck with RedHat on bare metal than any other distro.

Personally, I like Debian-based distros, but for physical hardware, RedHat is where it's at.

I created and deployed a vagrant centos 6.8 development environment for our dev team because we are developing for RHEL 6.8. It was not very hard to do.

RHEL is comparable to running LTS Ubuntu. If you want bleeding edge latest, that's what Fedora is for, not RHEL.

Network effects and legacy. Redhat was around long before Ubuntu, and they have a lot of inertia.

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