* Debian pushes security fixes really fast (I remember a local root exploit being patch in less than a day in debian while I waited a few more days on CentOS)

* Debian pushes security fixes really fast (I remember a local root exploit being patch in less than a day in debian while I waited a few more days on CentOS) * The general tooling is far better, lately, for example, I played with the tools used to build packages in clean chroots of each distributions: mock for CentOS, cowbuilder for Debian, cowbuilder is a lot more powerful, copy on right support, ability to build several packages in parallel, more switches in the cli arguments... mock is far more limited even if it does the job. Also I love reportbug, even if it seems antiquated at first (bug tracker based on emails, wtf!?), it's really really really convenient as it automatically grabs the information regarding the buggy package (logs, version, dependencies version...) and let you simply review it. * Debian as more packages available, even compared to CentOS+Epel * Debian as backports if you really need newer versions of a package * If you want/need to be on the bleeding edge, sid (or unstable) is a great rolling release. * Debian does a better job at maintaining stable version of a given software (I remember a few years ago, CentOS/RHEL updated OpenLDAP server to the latest version, which broke my directory on my (dev, fortunately) infrastructure due to a change in configuration format, this never happened to me on Debian). * If you have relatively clean upstream, packaging is nearly automatic on Debian thanks to all the dh_<helpers> * at least until CentOS 6, yum was a slow and fragile beast IMHO, apt being more robust and less susceptible to corrupt its DB in case of crash or interruptions. It seems to have gotten better with CentOS 7 however and I never played with dnf. On the minus side compared to CentOS: * kickstart is a dream to use compared to preseed which is quite horrible, specially if you are trying to template it. * The life span of a CentOS/RHEL is really long, +10 years for latest releases, which can be great for long, complex and slow projects, Debian in contrast is more on an EOL after ~5 years policy.