I've used both Debian proper and RHEL/CentOS in production. At one point I preferred Debian, but some years later I don't have a preference anymore. One is "bet

I've used both Debian proper and RHEL/CentOS in production. At one point I preferred Debian, but some years later I don't have a preference anymore. One is "better" than the other in a case-by-case basis. Debian has an advantage on package availability: almost everything you need exists in the official repositories. This is extremely handy for those of us that don't like to waste time installing things from source (because it is never about the time to install them, it's about the time to keep them updated). RHEL repositories aren't as extensive. Even using EPEL (which I feel is indispensable), sometimes things just aren't there. But what's there has 10 years of support, which is very important. In a setting where you have very little budget for specialized appliances and have to do everything on Linux (servers, routers, firewalls, balancers, ...), and can take the overhead of having to upgrade every 3-years, Debian is a nice choice. The repositories have all the nice extras for all kinds of uses. If you are using Linux for enterprise servers, where you have either proprietary software or your custom applications require a lot of paperwork to upgrade, it's nice to be able to keep them running for more than a decade. The regular ".x" updates do a good job of keeping things fairly current in terms of supported hardware (and feel), so it's not like things get only security updates. I don't like "yum" better than "apt-get" (both have advantages and disadvantages), but I do like ".rpm" better than ".deb" from a package builder standpoint. I'm biased, since I have packaged RPMs from scratch but never DEBs. However, when I build already existing packages from source, RPM just seems a cleaner format. Your mileage may vary.