CentOS / RHEL comes with a working SELinux setup out of the box, which is something that Debian lacks. For some, SELinux is just another pain in the arse to b

CentOS / RHEL comes with a working SELinux setup out of the box, which is something that Debian lacks. For some, SELinux is just another pain in the arse to be disabled as soon as you run into a permission problem, for others, it comes with a really nice set of features to further lock down your system ( including disabling ptrace, which has been a great cause of concern security wise ). Otherwise, things are somewhat different. No update-alternatives, vi is vim rather than nvi, Apache configuration is drastically different. The packaging system is a lot stricter, packages may not touch each others files, checksums & permissions are stored in the package DB and used to verify on both install, uninstall and upgrades. there's no "recommends" system, there's no interactive upgrade packages. ( No offers to "merge your samba config" or anything like that ) as the installer system is made to be usable headless. In "Enterprise" solutions, there's also support for Satellite ( http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/rhn-satellite/ http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/rhn-satellit... ) which is quite nifty. RHEL has older kernels, with a lot of features&fixes backported from newer development, causing them to be very strange beasts. Overall, I've used both, both have their place, but I really can't stand the fact that .deb archives need extra plugins to simply verify that nothing has fucked with permissions or file contents.