# Am I an Operating System snob?

> As an experienced Linux user, I discuss why I prefer CentOS for my servers, comparing it to Fedora and Ubuntu.

- Canonical: https://www.russ.cloud/2014/08/03/am-i-an-operating-system-snob/
- Published: 2014-08-03
- Author: Russ McKendrick
- Tags: Linux, Tools

---

Last week I posted about [upgrading my servers to CentOS 7](/2014/07/27/upgrading-my-servers-to-centos-7/), one of the main factors about upgrading to CentOS 7 was the jump in kernel version (from 2.6.x to 3.10.x).

Also, it was so that I could use more modern versions core of software without having to worry about installing numerous additional repos.

The funny thing is that all of the software I have been waiting to use have been available in both [Fedora](http://fedoraproject.org/) and [Ubuntu](http://www.ubuntu.com/server) for quite a while, so why have I waited?

For a start, for almost all my working life I have been using RPM based systems on servers (even the [Cobalt RaQs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_RaQ) were based on RedHat) so I am used to RedHat based Operating Systems such as [CentOS](http://www.centos.org/) and [Amazon Linux](http://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/).

Aha, so what about Fedora? Well, the release cycle has always put me off. Typically there is a new release every 6 months with each version only receiving support for around 13 months it is easy to get stuck in a cycle of rebuilding servers or doing distribution upgrades with each new release.

Because of this I always saw Fedora as more of a desktop distribution, rather than a server one. The same can be said about the non LTS releases of Ubuntu.

So what about the LTS release of Ubuntu? I have never really gotten on with the server edition of Ubuntu, while it has some great features I have always found it clunky (it’s way too easy to find yourself in dependency hell with PPAs) and far to different from what I am used to using.

However, with the advent of tools such as [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) and [Puppet](http://puppetlabs.com/) the underlying Operating System I am running should be less of a worry as I am either running just the few services I want to or all I have to do is define the configuration I want and let the orchestration software worry about how the machine gets configured.

I guess this is me becoming more DevOps :).