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If I were hosting an app that wouldn't require upgrading to up to date versions of whatever language it runs on, and I didn't want to upgrade the OS for 10 year
by jerrac 11y ago
If I were hosting an app that wouldn't require upgrading to up to date versions of whatever language it runs on, and I didn't want to upgrade the OS for 10 years or so, I'd look at CentOS.
But with how rapidly PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/etc advance, I prefer an OS that mostly keeps up with their latest versions. And Ubuntu's PPA system makes that a lot easier if you can find a PPA you trust.
When I first started, my predecessor had been fighting with upgrading PHP so that we could run Drupal on CentOS... 'Course he was still on hardware blades, not VM's. So he couldn't easily switch OS's. I got to move everything to VM's, and that's when I switch everything over to Ubuntu. After figuring out that CentOS wasn't the direction I wanted to go.
- noir_lord 11y agoAgreed entirely. The 2 year LTS release cycle combined with 5 year support means you can either stay in step lock with LTS or skip every other version and still have a year to upgrade, I retired my last 10.04 earlier this year, that thing ran in production for five years with less than 10 hours downtime :).
- ams6110 11y agoThey each have their strengths. If you're in Enterprise production, or scientific computing, you'll want RHEL or at least a distro based on that. Most enterprise, cluster and scientific software, as well as some hardware, is best-supported on RHEL-based distros, and the stability of these distros means few surprises during the disto's supported lifetime. If you're hosting your own web apps on commodity servers, more into VMs and containers, or you are more concerned with tracking current versions of languages, kernels, and other software than you are with long-term stability, then Ubuntu can work well.