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Comment by nsmartt | Hacker News Reader

> [W]e need reliability and predictability over a large variety of systems over many years. We need strong support by most of the world's software vendors and open source project. We need documentation, tools, and global resources for the most commonly used systems.

In which of these does Debain fall short?

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Compared to RHEL/CentOS the Debian release cycle is actually very short, with support for an older version ending just one year after the release of a new stable version. So in average you will only have support for about 3 years for each release, compared to at least 10 years for RHEL. That's why there has been some discussion about a possible Debian LTS release: http://lwn.net/Articles/565007/

Makes sense.

Lifecycle cannot be underestimated. The average life expectancy of a server is over 3 years. I'm pretty much running on a five year cycle, right now, for most of mine. It's a huge time cost to have to deploy a new OS more frequently than you deploy new servers.

I'm a user of Debian but can see why some people prefer Redhat, and I've used it myself.

Perhaps the main difference is that there is more official vendor support for Redhat i.e. device driver RPM's etc. This could be something like an LSI RAID card perhaps, or a filesystem like Stornext. I know you can often find community built software/drivers for Debian but some organisations and people prefer an "official" source.

Redhat has more documentation than Debian, and their ability to maintain older kernels is second to none.

Debian has a much bigger packaging ecosystem, and Ubuntu's popularity means that more and more things just never get tested on RH-derivatives.

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