On Wed, Mar 04, 2015 at 02:01:10PM -0700, Doug Hales wrote: > I recently was told by a hardware vendor that Debian is typically used for > clients, and CentOS is commonly used for servers. I haven't heard this > before, but I suppose there's some truth to it if you take into account all > Debian based distros. > > What are your thoughts? Is Debian a valid server OS for enterprise systems?
Debian stable is very "enterprise" ready. Debian has a rock-solid QA process
that ensures that packes in the "testing" release solidify over time, until
"testing" is ready to be released as the next stable.
The QA process involves the following [1]:
* It must have been in unstable for 10, 5 or 2 days, depending on the
urgency of the upload;
* It must be compiled and up to date on all architectures it has previously
been compiled for in unstable;
* It must not have release-critical bugs which do not also apply to the
version currently in "testing";
* All of its dependencies must either be satisfiable by packages already in
"testing", or be satisfiable by the group of packages which are going to
be installed at the same time;
* The operation of installing the package into "testing" must not break any
packages currently in "testing".
1) https://www.debian.org/devel/testing
See the FAQ[2] on that same page:
2) https://www.debian.org/devel/testing#faq
You can follow the status of the migration of testing -> stable by watching the
"release-critical bugs status":
https://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
I am not familiar with the RHEL/CentOS release cycle. However, I do know that
it releases "when ready" similar to Debian (unlike Ubuntu, where the release
date is more important than the quality of packages).
What makes Debian attractive, is you can run "testing" or "unstable "on your
workstation or laptop, if you wish. Unlike "stable", which is a frozen release,
"testing" and "unstable" are both rolling releases.
Don't let the code name fool you though. The "unstable" release is really quite
stable. In the 10+ years I have been running Debian, I can count on one hand
all the times there were critical breaks with "unstable" that left my system in
a bad state: X.org, CUPS, and a bad kernel module. The last break was something
like 2007, or so.
Only "stable" gets security updates, and "testing" after feature freeze.
Further, when "stable" becomes "oldstable" after the release of a new "stable",
the "oldstable" release will continue getting security updates for 1 year after
the new "stable" (if that makes sense).
Recently, there was some discussion about a Debian "LTS" for "oldstable"
releases to continue getting security updates for longer[3].
3) https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
So, IMO, Debian makes a very reliable and solid platform for mission critical
servers that need exceptional "enterprise" stability.
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