CentOS Linux vs. SCO UnixWare 7

I have been a CentOS user for over 10 years and remain loyal to the core OS. When it comes to stability and speed, there's no other OS I'd recommend over it. I base this recommendation on my personal experience, as I have multiple development and production servers running the CentOS software today. It's running on newer and older hardware with ease, and the price is right!

Incentivized

• First of all, CentOS is one of the most secure and stable OSes straits from the box.
• High performance on the average hardware.
• In most of my scenarios—easy and quick deployment.
• Huge KB community that helps to build and support different services on CentOS.
• Versions lifecycle.

Incentivized

• It's not as intuitive as it could be
• Some packages can be quite old compared with other distributions
• Breaking changes appear often when packages are obsoleted usually with no supported transition path (this is a general *NIX problem, but it's more accentuated in CentOS)

Incentivized

Again, written documentation is excellent, even on the older versions. The support community is the best. It is comprehensive and I would say that it global because it transcends national boundaries. Also, you find all types of people using CentOS to do all sorts of things so you are bound to find someone to talk to if there are problems.

Incentivized

Ubuntu Linux is another candidate that we've evaluated. It stacks up well against CentOS Linux, however it does have some quirks we need to deal with such as package management and stability. For the most part, the server version of Ubuntu is stable, but we stick with CentOS Linux because it seems to have a slight edge over Ubuntu in that realm as well. I have colleagues at other firms that are wholesale Ubuntu server infrastructure, and they are very happy with it and Ubuntu is favorable there. With the changes that have occurred or may still yet occur at CentOS Linux, we may go down the path towards Ubuntu. But for now, CentOS Linux is where we are parked and will remain for the foreseeable future.

Incentivized

• Since CentOS is free, our developers and engineers can use it without regard for dipping into project budgets.
• We can spin up a CentOS VM, use it and then destroy it without having to worry about licensing headaches.
• CentOS can run on just about any hardware platform: server, laptop, old hardware, etc. so that makes it less expensive in that we don't have to buy specialized hardware for it.

Incentivized