I personally moved my Linodes to SL from CentOS (since Linode doesn't offer SL image, you start with centos base, switch mirrors, do update - pretty painless) a

I personally moved my Linodes to SL from CentOS (since Linode doesn't offer SL image, you start with centos base, switch mirrors, do update - pretty painless) after CentOS took forever getting it's 6.0 version out. It wasn't that CentOS took a long time, it was that the whole process lacked transparency. You couldn't tell who was responsible for what and what the plans were. If they published status reports it wasn't anywhere public (at least, nowhere reachable through their site, google searches, or mentioned in mailing lists). At the time, I had no idea who was in charge of CentOS, who worked on it and kept it up with security updates. Even nowadays it's not so clear (the menu dropdown lists their team members, but seriously, CentOS 2.1 lead is on there? Nobody is listed as being responsible for 6, and there's only one guy listed as being responsible for security). Contrast this with SL, where they have paid staff working on the project (http://www.scientificlinux.org/about/credit http://www.scientificlinux.org/about/credit), publish a clear roadmap (http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/roadmap http://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/roadmap) and have a security policy in place (http://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/faq/errata http://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/faq/errata). If you want real guarantees, then you should pay RedHat or Oracle. If you need a free high quality RHEL clone, I recommend SL over CentOS. Also, being on Linode also means I don't use the SL kernel (with it's custom patches). I use the ones provided by Linode, and security on that end is taken care of by them, so that difference doesn't affect me.