1) One reason would be that increasingly often, when you search for some rhel/centos problem, the solution is behind a paywall at access.redhat.com. Not that I

1) One reason would be that increasingly often, when you search for some rhel/centos problem, the solution is behind a paywall at access.redhat.com. Not that I blame RH, they are a commercial company and need to make money somehow. Or similarly, you get a search hit for bugzilla.redhat.com, but it turns out that the bug has been marked customers only, so you can't access it unless you have a RHEL subscription. 2) For major and minor releases, they are months behind RH. That may or may not be a problem for you, though. 3) Debian is less beholden to the interests of any one corporate entity (for better or worse), if that kind of thing appeals to you. 4) Debian has a huge number of packages, much more than CentOS + EPEL. 5) On the fly upgrade to the next release. Though in a professional setting where you have automated provisioning, reinstall isn't that much of a burden anyway. That being said, both CentOS and Debian are very solid distros, you're not going wrong if you choose one of them.