I don't know what your level of expertise is. Please accept my apology if
you already know this.

The two particular distributions you mentioned are pretty different. Debian
basically started as its own branch of distribtuion, and other distributions
like Ubuntu and Mepis are derived from it. CentOS is derivative of RedHat.
Most disributions come from one of these two branches.

For me, the top virtue of Debian is that it gives you a very basic install.
You get the command line and a few packages. Then, you have to add
everything else. What this means is that the latest version of Debian will
actually work pretty well on a machine that has only 512 MB of memory.

Package managers are different on both. CentOS uses the RPM (Redhat Package
Manager), while Debian uses APT. I think APT works much better. Debian
definitely resolves dependencies much better than others.

One other person mentioned Gentoo. It's got a very good reputation for being
lean and efficient. Gentoo users love Gentoo. The downside is that the
install compiles from source and take a long time. I don't have personal
experience with Gentoo. If you are an experienced Linux user, go ahead and
try Gentoo. If you are a beginning Linux user, I don't recommend it.

More and more, it seems like trying on Linux distributions is like trying on
new suits. Some fit for some people, others fit for other people.

Chris Baker -- cbaker AT intera DOT com
systems administrator
INTERA -- 512-425-2006




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