В чем различие между debian и red hat

RedHat vs Debian : Administrative Point of View

There are hundreds of Linux distributions available, for free (in the other sense). Every Linux Enthusiast has a special taste for certain distribution, at some point of time. The taste for specific distribution largely depends upon the intended area of application. Some the famous Linux distributions and its area of application are listed below.

1. Fedora: Cutting Edge Technology Implementation
2. RedHat and Debian Server
3. Ubuntu: one of the Introductory distro for Newbies
4. Kali and Backtrack: Penetration Testing, etc.

Well this article aims to compare RedHat (Fedora, CentOS) and Debian (Ubuntu) from an administrator point of view. RedHat is a commercial Linux Distribution, which is most widely used on a number of servers, across the world. Fedora is the testing laboratory of RedHat which is well known for its bleeding edge technology implementation, which is released every six month.

Here the question is when there are hundreds of Linux distribution available for free (in either sense, open-source and economic), why would someone invest hundreds of bucks in buying a Linux Distribution, making RedHat so much successful. Well the answer is RedHat is very much stable.

The life cycle is of about ten years and after all there is someone to be blamed if something doesn’t work, the corporate culture. CentOS is another distribution which is RedHat minus Non-Free packages. CentOs is a stable distribution hence latest version of all packages is pushed into its RPM after testing, the focus remains on stability of distribution.

Debian on the other hand is a Linux distribution which is very much stable and contains very large number of packages into its repository. Any other distribution that comes close to Debian at this point is Gentoo. On my Debian server (Squeeze), which is a bit outdated.

You see packages more than 37.5K! Everything you need is present in the repository itself. The package manager Apt is too smart to resolve all the dependency problem itself. Very rarely a Debian user requires to download and install dependency manually. Debian is built with a number of package manager which makes package management a cake walk.

Ubuntu which is a Linux distribution for newbies. A newbie Linux Enthusiast is suggested to start with Ubuntu in most of the Linux forum. Ubuntu maintains a simple and user-friendly interface, which gives a feeling of Windows like OS to a new user.

Debian is the base of Ubuntu, but their repository varies. Ubuntu contains newer updated packages and is still stable. In-fact Ubuntu is highly appreciated by newbies as well as advanced users.

Taking the above description into the next stage by presenting them in a point-wise fashion for better understanding and reference, here we go.

1. RedHat is Most Widely used Distribution for servers.
Debian is widely used Distribution next to RedHat.

2. RedHat is Commercial Linux Distribution.
Debian is Non-commercial Linux Distribution.

3. RedHat contains roughly 3000 packages.
Latest Debian Release (Wheezy) contains well over 38000 packages.

It means Debian contains nearly 80% more packages than RedHat and this is the reason Debian contains packages like openoffice, Transmission bittorrent client, mp3 codecs, etc which a RedHat like distribution lacks and is required to be installed manually or from 3rd party repository.

4. RedHat bug fixing takes considerable time, since it is controlled by a small group of people-RedHat Employee.
Bug fixing in Debian is very much quick as people all around the globe from Debian community, working from different geographical location simultaneously fixes it.

5. RedHat don’t release package updates, till next release, means you have to wait for the next release be it minor.
Debian community believes – software is a continuous evolution process, hence updates are released on Daily Basis.

6. RedHat releases major updates every six month and nothing in between. Installing new updates in RedHat based System is a tuff task, where you need to reinstall everything.
Installing the Debian updates being released everyday is a pretty easy task barely 3-4 clicks away.

7. RedHat is rock solid stable distribution released after continuous testing.
Debian contains packages from stable, unstable and testing Repository. Stable contains rock solid stable release packages. Unstable contains more updated packages ready to be pushed into stable repository. Testing contains packages already tested and marked safe.

8. RedHat package manager Yum is less mature and is not able to solve dependencies automatically, many a times.
Debian package manager Apt is very mature and solve dependency automatically, most of the times.

9. Installing VLC in RedHat Beta Release 6.1, is a very difficult task which requires installing tens of packages manually.
In Debian it is as simple as apt-get install vlc*

10. Debian is intelligent in differentiating Configuration files with other files. This makes upgradation easy. The virgin (untouched) configuration files are updated automatically and the one modified, requires users interaction as the package manager ask what to do, but this is not the case with RedHat.

11. RedHat uses the rpm packages.
Debian uses the deb packages.

12. RedHat uses the RPM package manager.
Debian uses the dpkg package manager.

13. RedHat uses the yum dependency resolver.
Debian uses the apt-get dependency resolver.

14. Fedora uses single global repository which contains free software’s only.
Debian contains contribute and Non-free repository along with free software repository.

15. According to Wikipedia, Ubuntu is a based on the unstable branch of Debian but Fedora is not a derivative and has a more direct relationship and stays close to many upstream projects.

16. Fedora uses ‘su‘ whereas Ubuntu uses ‘sudo‘ by default.

17. Fedora ships with SELinux installed and enabled by default along with some other ‘hardening’ software to make things more secure by default, unlike Debian.

18. Debian is a community based distribution, unlike RedHat.

19. Security is one of the most important issue for both RedHat and Debian.

20. Fedora, CentOs, Oracle Linux are among those distribution developed around RedHat Linux and is a variant of RedHat Linux.
Ubuntu, Kali, etc are few of the variant of Debian. Debian truly is a mother distribution of a number of Linux Distro.

21. Installation, of RedHat is little easy to install as compared to Debian. Internet Connection during RedHat installation is option. Internet connection during Debian Installation is optional but recommended. Moreover till squeeze, one needs to acquire WEP key, to use wifi network (installation). WEP Is not used these days and this is painful during installation of Debian, before wheezy. Wheezy supports both WEP ans WPA.

My Prespective

I have used RedHat Enterprise Linux (Beta), Fedora, Centos, Debian and Ubuntu for years. Being a Linux professional Fedora’s unstability didn’t suit me. CentOs was a good option but resolving dependency manually and reinstalling everything after upgrade was a bad idea form me and my team’s point of view.

RedHat was very stable but afterall my company didn’t like the idea of spending thousands of bucks for RedHat Enterprise Edition and getting outdated software.

Ubuntu seems too much childish to me to be used in servers of the Organization handling critical data.

One of my colleague suggested me with slack, Mint, etc but after all how many server runs on slack and Mint in the world? Debian my favorite distribution suited my organization very well. Now most of my server are running Debian and I didn’t repent this, Indeed Implementing Debian at my workplace was a very cool idea.

You may disagree with my point of view but you can’t escape the truth, as stated above. This article aims to throw light on the fact and not controversy. Every distribution has it’s pros and cons. All the Linux distribution available today are surviving because they have a supportive community and user group, which we respect.

That’s all for now. We tried to provide you with the relevant information, in a nice format. Don’t forget to provide us with your valuable comments and suggestion, which is highly appreciated. I will soon be coming up with another Interesting article. Till then stay tuned and connected to TecMint.com for latest news on FOSS and Linux.

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109 thoughts on “RedHat vs Debian : Administrative Point of View”

“Ubuntu: one of the Introductory distro for Newbies”

A bit condescending, no? I’ve been using Kubuntu for about a decade now. Thankfully, it works well for “newbies” because it’s much easier to manage and there are a lot more packages available for it. If I want to run server packages, it handles them just fine, too. Under the hood, in terms of the kernel, they’re the same, although one might be on a newer version than the other.

Being able to run “non-free” packages is pretty important too, like if you ever want to listen to an mp3 file. Sure, most servers won’t need this. But the fact that I run my servers on Kubuntu doesn’t make them any less capable that if I were using RHEL. The REAL difference with RHEL is you get paid support, while with Debian-based distros, you’re on your own if something goes wrong.

In Debian, packages from unstable (Sid) are pushed to testing ( next stable release). After ten present more days without any report of bugs in the package or with any other packages is accepted in testing branch.

Stable is not updated except from bug or security fixes.

This article is a bit outdated, nowadays RHEL (and its free version – Centos) are very mature, and are greatly suited for an enterprise deployments.

Yet it’s true, that Fedora based distros (or RHEL & Centos that are the server versions) are a bit more cumbersome compared to Ubuntu, but once again – I would prefer them over Debian family..

There is plenty of useful information here, especially regarding repositories and dependency resolution.

As others have pointed out, su and sudo are two completely different animals and they are both used in RHEL and Debian alike.

Ubuntu is not “childish”, it just comes packaged with things that are usually not installed in a server environment. However, there is a server version of Ubuntu (Ubuntu Server) that is fantastic. If your server will stand alone, Ubuntu Server is the way to go, imho. If you are creating a clustered environment for parallel computing, Centos or RHEL are probably better choices.

16. Fedora uses ‘su‘ whereas Ubuntu uses ‘sudo‘ by default.

That’s wrong. Fedora uses ‘su‘ and Ubuntu uses ‘su‘. Fedora also uses ‘sudo‘ and Ubuntu also uses ‘sudo‘

‘su‘ means like switch user, you can do ‘su username‘ to switch which works on both.

and, I would never use Debian as a server. It must be Centos and Redhat.

For applications, I always go with Debian.

So, Frontends are always RHEL variant, Backends are always Debian variant for me.

I wouldn’t try to set up 3rd party apps on Enterprise distros; they were born to be the server, not to be workstations.

I also wouldn’t compile sources in RHEL variant; I got Ubuntu on that.
And all of my client’s software, backends are all Debian & Ubuntu.

Debian vs Redhat, they both have unique roles in the commercial business.

RHEL fulfill the companies.
Debian satisfies the end-users.

So now it is all about containers. I will go for Kubernette; so now you already know my desktop is Fedora.

“16. Fedora uses su… by default.” Maybe this meant something when the article was first published in 2013? I’m not sure that it’s necessarily “wrong,” just not applicable. Yes containers are where it’s at, and everything written about apt, yum and rpm in the article is outdated.

The one situation I might pay attention to the package manager is pacman, and the AUR, specifically BlackArch versus Kali. Kali is great for certification. It is becoming to “ethical hacking” what Red Hat became to Linux certification.

Arch and derivatives are impressive for other reasons, I just don’t hear about them out in the wild much and I think would reflect better on penetration testers. I just can’t help but think Kali is too easy for newbies to latch onto.

I also think the part about RH being commercial and Debian being non-commercial is understated in the article. Some of the other arguments seem a little arbitrary. You can make Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu work in any role if you really need to. Tell your non-technical supervisor it’s all Linux.

Well in the cloud world of 2018 Ubuntu is pretty much on spot with the increasing demands for devops.

In our enterprise we use Ubuntu servers and I can say for certain we have a better time configuring and maintaining the machines as oppose to administrators that use Linux like in the old days…

I don’t know what you are trying to prove your point to with “never using Ubuntu on servers”, Ubuntu is the best at the moment… Unless you need constant support.

В чем различие между debian и red hat

Debian has a lot of packages. Let me say that again. Debian has a lot of packages. The only Linux distro which can compete on these grounds, at all, is Gentoo.

Let me give some details. On my debian desktop, I asked APT for some stats about its database ( apt-cache stats ). It claims to know of 23533 packages, including 28382 distinct versions. The debian project only claims a modest 15490 packages, but that’s a low estimate.

For comparison, I asked CentOS 3 for roughly the same information: yum list displays just 680 packages. On another Red Hat-based system, it claims to provide 1199 packages. CentOS 4.1 has 1406 (or 1538 with the «plus» and «extras» enabled), which is just 6% to 6.5% the size of debian. And on the newest fedora, it may even have as many as 2000. But that’s a far, far cry from 23000+. Over 90% of the packages are missing!

Why does this matter?

• Ardour: professional sound editor.
• Sweep: DJ’s sound editor.
• CheeseTracker: music composer.
• PovRay: 3D render.
• MPlayer: audio/video player and swiss-army multimedia tool.
• VLC: audio/video player (VideoLan Client).
• Video file manipulation tools: mkvtoolnix, ogmtools.
• MP3 players: madplay, mpg321, mpg123.
• Other audio-format players: xmp, festalon, etc.
• Games and game emulators: Abuse, Pingus, FCEU, Zsnes, SNES9x, xdemineur, Frozen Bubble, Armagetron, GL-Tron, etc.
• (X)MAME, the arcade machine emulator.
• JsCalibrator, for calibrating joysticks.
• XKBD, an onscreen keyboard for tablet/PDA input.
• BitchX, popular IRC client.
• DircProxy, the detachable IRC proxy.
• PyGame and Python-OpenGL: SDL and OpenGL support for Python.
• Xaos, the fast fractal zoomer.
• The Enlightentment desktop, and friends (Eterm, etc).
• Window managers in general: sawfish, FVWM, IceWM, pwm, ratpoison, Matchbox, .
• Exiftran, for automatically processing your digital camera photos.
• BitTorrent, BitTornado, etc.
• Alien, for converting and installing packages from other distros.
• Checkinstall, for auto-packaging from source.
• FakeRoot, for safely building packages as a regular user.
• PwGen, the password generator.
• A dictionary. (dict-gcide, dict-wn)
• A thesaurus. (dict-moby-thesaurus)
• QEMU, the fast computer emulator.
• DOSEMU; DOS emulator.
• x11vnc, for making the current desktop available over the network.
• TightVNC viewers/server; a more efficient remote desktop solution.
• x2x, which allows the user to control multiple computers with one keyboard/mouse.
• xzoom, which enlarges portions of the screen.
• Intelligent auto-DJ for XMMS (gjay), visualizer plugin (goom), or even the basic XMMS package.
• Ability to record the output of audio programs (vsound).
• SmokePing; monitors network response times.
• EtterCap; gives detailed network traffic analysis.
• ModLogAn, for summarizing Apache (and other) log files.
• WebMin, the popular web-based administration suite.
• PhpMyAdmin, a powerful web-based front end to MySQL.
• GDesklets, providing useful and pretty desktop widgets.
• RadeonTool, NVidia Source, and other accelerated video support packages.
• Courier, the easy and fast IMAP/POP/SMTP server.
• . and many others.

Looking again, at the extras repository, I managed to find XMMS and BitTorrent. But the rest are all missing. And I was looking for packages which, for the most part, are well-known, popular, and interesting to a large audience. Chances are that you won’t find everything you’re looking for in a Red Hat-based distro.

Quality

Debian has over a thousand package maintainers. I hear it may be nearly two thousand by now, though I don’t know the exact number. That means each maintainer is responsible for anywhere from 8 to 24 packages, on average. The packages are maintained by people who care about the specific software they provide, and usually are experts on what they package. In many cases, the maintainers make significant improvements from the upstream versions, which usually find their way back to the author eventually.

Red Hat systems usually have a much smaller package team — anywhere from one person to a few dozen. Each maintainer is responsible, on average, for anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred packages. Many Red Hat-based distros simply recompile the SRPMs every six months when Red Hat makes a new release, without really checking the package quality at all — even to see if the packages are broken. This all tends to result in lower overall package quality. (sometimes even Red Hat doesn’t check whether its packages work. for example, the broken gcc in RH7.0)

It’s also worth mentioning the packaging guidelines in Debian. Packages must meet certain criteria, which creates a high degree of consistency. I won’t get into detail just now, but for example, you can find documentation on any package by looking in /usr/share/doc/package-name .

Feeds vs Releases

I haven’t reinstalled the OS on my desktop computer since 1997, when I first installed Debian. And yes, it’s still up to date — running a kernel which is, as I write this, 34 days old, plus the latest versions of nearly everything else: X11, Firefox, GIMP, Apache, and so on.

Instead of asking yourself «when do I want to schedule a massive upgrade?», Debian lets you simply decide easier things like «how cutting-edge do I want to be?» and «do I feel like upgrading Bind today?».

Upgrade Patterns

Software is a continuously-evolving field; a moving target, as it were. Software is released or updated every day, and Debian reflects this by releasing new and updated packages daily. You don’t have to wait 6 months until the next release, so you can upgrade whenever you want to.

Let me put it a different way. Red Hat uses a «stair step» upgrade pattern, and Debian uses a «smooth slope» pattern. Here are some diagrams to show what I mean.

	The Red Hat upgrade pattern is much like a flight of stairs or series of cliffs. Each step, six months apart, brings major upgrades, but there is little activity between releases. Many people opt to skip entire release cycles, to avoid the hassle of having to reinstall everything, and end up pretty far behind.
	The Debian testing and/or unstable (see below) upgrade pattern is a fairly smooth curve, with new packages coming out daily. Users may upgrade whenever they like, as much or as little as desired, and in a smooth manner which avoids the need to perform traumatic rebuilds or reinstalls.
	The two graphs combined reflect some other details. Both distros are always just a little behind the upstream developers, since it takes time to package and test new software. Red Hat tends to be a little bit newer when a new Fedora release comes out, but Debian is usually more up-to-date the rest of the time.

By using a smooth upgrade process, you never have to take the Red Hat «leap of faith» where you upgrade everything all at once (or rebuild/reinstall), and hope everything still works afterward.

This translates into serious cost savings because it avoids the need to rebuild servers every year. Just update small pieces now and then whenever it’s appropriate to do so, and the server will keep running indefinitely. You can generally even do complete hardware upgrades without having to reinstall the software. Just move the old hard drive into the new machine, or copy its contents verbatim, and you’re done.

Stable, Testing, Unstable

• The stable feed is very similar to a release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s rock-solid, and maintained with security updates for quite some time after it’s released. However, stable is not released very often, and uses a stair-step upgrade pattern.
• So, for something more up to date, users can add the unstable feed to their apt sources. This is where new packages usually go, so you can always have the latest software available. And despite the name, it’s actually quite stable. Things don’t break in unstable. often.
• Most people are better off using the testing feed. Don’t let the name fool you — it would be more appropriate to call it the tested feed, since it’s where packages go after they have been tested and deemed safe. It’s nearly as up-to-date as unstable most of the time, but much safer.
• If, for some reason, there’s a brand-new piece of software you absolutely must have, and it’s not in unstable yet, you can use the experimental feed. This is almost never necessary, though.

Package Manager

Package Configuration

Debian incorporates configuration into the package-installation process. Red Hat decided that automatic, hands-free installation was preferable. Which one is really better is debatable, but I find the configuration step in Debian to be a useful and valuable idea. Many packages provide a simple, modular, easy, menu-driven configurator — built right into the package. So, during the install, it asks you questions about anything it thinks is «important enough» to be worth asking. (you can set a preference for the level of importance beforehand) And if you change your mind later, you can «dpkg-reconfigure mypackage» to change the settings.

• The user doesn’t have to learn dozens of different configuration tools and file formats, and the quirks of each.
• Preferences chosen in the menus can be automatically applied to updates, even if the underlying config format changes. This means you don’t have to answer the same questions over and over, and don’t have to care if the config file changes to a different language.
• Unimportant settings can be skipped automatically, so the novice user (or busy user) doesn’t have to care about them.
• Every package uses the same user-friendly interface for configuration. (well, many packages, anyway)

Config File Handling

• use your version (but keep a copy of the new version if you need it)
• use the new default version (but keep a copy of your custom version)
• see how the two versions are different
• manually resolve the differences

Overall Maturity

The Fedora project shows a lot of potential. It’s a step in the right direction for Red Hat. In many ways, it’s a partial clone of Debian. But it’s not very mature yet. Debian has been around, running itself via its fully-democratic self-government, since the early days of Linux — and it has become a very stable and mature system.

Similarly, APT has been working rather well for nearly a decade. OTOH, Red Hat’s package manager (Yum) is still a rather new and unsophisticated project. The latest Yum still hasn’t caught up to where apt was 5 years ago.

Speed

I can’t say I’m completely happy with the speed APT runs at. But I can say that it’s much faster than Yum. And by «much», I mean anywhere from 50 to 500 times faster. I did some basic tests for things like listing the number of packages, searching for a keyword, and deciding what upgrades are available. and apt gave me results in a matter of 0 to 3 seconds, while yum took about 30 to 90 seconds for the same operations, on a machine with much faster hardware.

Part of this is because Yum insists on doing the equivalent of «apt-get update» before every operation. And yes, I tried the command line option to disable that. It didn’t make any difference — apparently that option is still broken. But Yum is also generally just slower, taking over a minute (after the package list update) to complete operations which took apt just a couple seconds.

I also found that the output of apt made me faster. It prints results in a much more concise, readable form than Yum. And APT’s ability to answer questions in just a second or two really helps me work with the system rather than fighting against it.

Update 2006-03-21: Fedora Core 5 was just released, and I hear that yum has gotten significantly faster. It now takes only 7-14 seconds to run things such as «yum info glibc». The same operation in Debian, «apt-cache show libc6», takes 0.01s on my aging desktop system. APT in this case is still

1000 times faster, but 7-14 seconds really isn’t bad.

However, the new graphical package manager in FC5 is apparently very slow. It took 45 minutes to load the dependencies on a Pentium 4, compared to 5-6 seconds to do the same thing in Synaptic on Ubuntu on a Pentium 3. (that’s even worse, considering that FC5 has only 2200 (+2200 extras) packages, or about 20% as many as what «apt-cache stats» lists on Ubuntu) By my rough estimations, the FC5 package GUI takes 4500 times longer to start than Ubuntu’s package GUI (450 times as long * 5X fewer packages * 2X faster CPU).

Custom Distros

Looking briefly at DistroWatch, I notice that five of the top ten distros are based on Debian. Two or three are based on Red Hat (depending on whether SuSE counts), and the remaining two are Slackware and Gentoo. Why are so many successful distros based on debian?

The answer, I think, is that Debian is designed to make derivative products easy to make. It’s currently the most suitable base for custom distros. It has a relatively tiny base system, an extremely flexible design, and all its distro-building tools are freely available. All the processes for building Debian are a matter of public knowledge, with most of the communication also executed in public channels. In short, Debian applies the open source philosophy to building a distro.

It takes a lot of time and effort to make a Linux distribution. Making one from scratch requires ungodly amounts of time and effort, unless you’re making a very small distro. According to a recent study, Debian 3.1 («Sarge») consists of about 230 million source lines of code, with an estimated 60,000 person-years and $8 billion USD redevelopment cost. This makes it, by a wide margin, the single largest software project ever created.

To be fair, the Debian developers didn’t write most of that code. They merely organize, clean, patch, package, and distribute it. and write code to make the system work better. However, managing a repository of practically all free software in the world is no easy task. It takes nearly 2000 people to keep Debian up-to-date. This is why Fedora has less than 10% as many packages as Debian — Fedora simply does not have enough package maintainers to compete.

Other, misc

Many little details about Red Hat systems bother me. Many of these seem to be half-cloned features from other OSes or distros, not implemented as well as the original. I already mentioned Yum compared to APT, but there are other similar examples. Red Hat still encourages the use of rc.local , which seems like a bad idea. It uses somewhat Debian-like ifup and ifdown commands to manage network interfaces, but the workings of those commands are lacking. The configuration, in particular, is overcomplicated for no reason. Red Hat still doesn’t have its SysVInit scripts in the standard location, though it at least has symlinks to them in the right spot.

Packages are named inconsistently, or in an overly generic manner — for example, «named» and «httpd» instead of «bind9» and «apache2». What if you wanted some other server, like nsd or boa? Debian provides generic packages too, but only for convenience. They merely depend on the real package — the equivalent of symlinks, except for packages.

Kudzu. Yuck. Servers should not fail to boot because the mouse is unplugged. (I hear this behavior is fixed now, as of late 2005.)

Package (file)names. Debian uses name_version_arch.ext, which is simple, consistent, and easy to parse. Red Hat’s names are ambiguous — they use dashes both in the package name and to separate the name from the version. This problem is complicated because some packages include a version in their names, and then have an additional version after an ambiguous dash.

Custom kernels, especially in RHEL. The special patches applied tend to break things. For example, a «feature» which introduces resource starvation into the kernel. on purpose. Because someone at Red Hat thought they knew better than the Linux community. The end result is that the RHEL kernel does weird things like kill init instead of dumping old cached data when it needs more memory.

Another break-the-kernel patch introduced serious scheduling bugs into the Red Hat kernel around v2.4.20: a waiting process would sometimes not be scheduled to run for exceptionally long periods of time. This causes all sorts of problems, like causing heartbeat to think it’s dead and take down the machine it’s running on — the opposite of what high-availability software is supposed to do.

Dependencies

In Red Hat, it’s standard practice to use file dependencies in addition to (or sometimes instead of) regular package dependencies. The only practical benefit of this that I have been able to find is it slightly eases the creation of cross-distro packages. Three different Red Hat-based distros may have three different names for a package. So, if you want to create your own RPM which works on all three, it’s easier to check for a file you know that other package has than to check for the name of the package.

Coming from a debian background, the idea of cross-distro packages seems rather odd to me. But 3rd-party packages are a necessity in the Red Hat world, since the main package set is so tiny. Red Hat simply does not provide enough packages to make up a complete system. And there are so many different flavors of Red Hat that it would be infeasible for 3rd-party package authors to make different packages for each flavor.

So, people use file dependencies. It may defeat the point of having a package namespace, but it is an effective kludge to work around the lack of standards between related distros. And having semi-broken software is arguably better than having no software at all.

Otherwise, file dependencies just cause problems.

Gentoo

Just a quick note or two about Gentoo.

Debian has a lot in common with Gentoo. Both have similar advantages in terms of available packages, upgrade mechanisms, and general choice. If anything, Gentoo offers even more choice than Debian, or perhaps inflicts more choice. And that’s a good thing, if you know what you’re doing. But I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t very technical or detail-oriented.

Gentoo also has some drawbacks, compared to debian. The main drawback is compiling. especially on older or slower machines. It can take a week to get a full Gentoo desktop system built. It may run a bit faster afterward, but the extra speed costs time.

If you’ve got the time, and especially if you’ve got an affinity for the bleeding edge, Gentoo is a great distro. For most people though, a Debian-based distro like Ubuntu is probably a better idea.

OS Linux (Ubuntu/Debian/Сentos/Fedora/RHEL). А есть ли разница?

Сегодня мы поговорим об операционных системах семействах GNU/Linux и о разнице между ними. Но говорить будем не о десктопных, а о серверных ОС.

На текущий момент наиболее часто используются следующие ОС семейства Linux:

1. Ubuntu

2. Centos

3. Debian

4. RedHat

Список составлен, исходя из статистики востребованности серверных операционных систем. Хотя многие могут и не согласиться, но, по мнению автора, на сегодня серверные операционные системы GNU/Linux можно разделить на 2 вида:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

И начнем мы обсуждение с Red Hat Enterprise Linux (в будущем RHEL). На текущий момент RHEL не только начала распространять Enterprise-версию по системе «no-cost»-подписки, но и особо выделяет некоторые направления:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server — возможность разработки корпоративных приложений и решений на базе Linux.

Dev tools с долгосрочной поддержкой — каждый крупный релиз Red Hat Enterprise Linux включает в себя набор базового инструментария, который будет поддерживаться на протяжении десяти лет (Python, PHP, Ruby, OpenJDK 7 (1.7), OpenJDK 8 (1.8) и многое другое).

Сейчас в RHEL входят такие проекты как Centos и Fedora Core. Сначала Centos был бесплатной версии RHEL без логотипа и поддержки компании. Стабильность дистрибутива не страдала. Fedorа же была дистрибутивом, поддерживаемым сообществом на базе бесплатной Centos. Теперь RHEL спонсирует проект Fedora Core и проект из дистрибутива стал тестовым «полигоном» RHEL.

Fedora — самый часто обновляемый дистрибутив. Его новые версии выходят каждые 6-9 месяцев. Все самые новые фишки «обкатываются» на пользователях именно черезFedora Core. И не важно, десктопная это версия или серверная.

На втором месте по обновляемости — Centos. Последняя версия – Centos 7– появилась спустя 3 года после выпуска Centos 6, в июле 2011 года.

На третьем месте у нас Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Каждая ветка дистрибутива поддерживается по 10 лет, c возможностью продлить поддержку до 13 лет.

Debian/Ubuntu

Первые версии операционной системы Debian появились в 1993 году. Это был полностью некоммерческий проект. Из-за особенностей философии дистрибутива он до сих пор растет и развивается. Серверный дистрибутив Debian менее популярен, чем Ubuntu. Почему? Всё из-за desktop-версии Ubuntu. Ubuntu — детище Debian и Canonical. Первая версия появилась на свет в далеком 2005 году. Canonical более чем лоялен к критике и пожеланиям пользователей. Поэтому за какие-то 16 лет desktop-версии Ubuntu удалось зарекомендовать себя как самой удобной системе, работающей из коробки. Продаются компьютеры и нетбуки с Ubuntu. Большая часть пользователей, которая только начинает знакомство с Linux, устанавливает именно Ubuntu. Отсюда большое число мануалов по настройке. Это отразилось и на серверной Ubuntu Server. При запросе «Как настроить «что-то» на VPS» 99% статей будут посвящены процессу установки приложения именно UbuntuServer.

Итак, в чем же разница между дистрибутивами?

Разница не только в названиях или в философии. Разница как минимум в пакетных менеджерах. Если RHEL, Centos и Fedora используют yum, rpm и DNF, то в Debian и Ubuntu используется пакетный менеджер APT (apt-get в старых версиях Ubuntu).

Разница в файлах конфигурации. Если в семействе RHEL структура папок говорит нам о том, что система готова разместить 1 проект, то в Debian и Ubuntu папки и конфиги подготовлены таким образом, как будто сразу после установки Ubuntu Server мы планируем развернуть маленький хостинг с большим числом сайтов. Хотя, как правило, происходит наоборот.

Разница также в огромном числе уже готовых собранных «пакетов» (в Ubuntu Server).

В данной статье мы не углубляемся в сравнение технических различий, а лишь проходим по самому очевидному. Выбор операционной системы для сервера — это выбор между стабильностью и простотой (в случае выбора между RHEL-семейством и Ubuntu/Debian). По мнению автора, любой проект, развернутый на Centos, можно развернуть и на Ubuntu. Но во втором случае, скорее всего, это будет просто чуть быстрее из-за большего числа готовых «пакетов».

RedHat vs Debian

By Priya Pedamkar

Difference Between RedHat and Debian

RedHat by RedHat Inc. provides open source products for any to buy and use, for which the licenses can be free up until some extend. For features beyond that, one can always pay and purchase the licenses for extra features. Debian by Debian project provides free software products for anyone to access the licensed applications without any limitations for the accessible features. While RedHat releases products like Linux as a commercial distribution, Debian releases non-commercial products. The latest stable release from RedHat was version 7.5, available from April 10, ‘18, and Debian’s recent stable release was version 9.5, available from July 14, ’18.

Head To Head Comparison Between RedHat and Debian (Infographics)

Below is the top 12 difference between RedHat vs Debian

Web development, programming languages, Software testing & others

Key Differences Between RedHat and Debian

Both are popular choices in the market; let us discuss some of the major difference.

1. Market Share: The market share of both shares can be stated as a decisive and key factor for one leading the other. Below is some of the market share distribution (analytical view). Debian leads in top 10K sites, top 100k, top 1M sites and the entire web category, whereas RedHat is lagging behind in the market shares category, it loses to Debian in all the segments.

1. Website Categories: As we all are well aware of the huge numbers of websites available all across the globe. These websites are more or less divided into categories based on the ground of objectives or purpose of their serve. Talking of the business industry, arts and entertainments, shopping, telecom, and several others, Debian is the leader as it has better usage coverage in these web categories, whereas RedHat is making an impact only on few web categories like Dentistry and Men’s Health.

1. Geographical: Geographically, Debian is accepted to by peoples of more countries compared to RedHat. On one side, Debian makes a strong impact in countries like Germany, Russia, France, the US and 220 other countries, whereas talking of RedHat, it successfully created its market base in countries like Japan, Taiwan, Bahamas, Switzerland. From a country perspective, we can easily figure out the impact of Debian in the Indian web market.

1. Packages: RedHat contains around 3000 packages roughly whereas the latest Debian release (which is Wheezy) contains more than 38000 packages listing. A general comparison on packages clearly says that Debian provides around 80%more packages than RedHat provides to its users. Comparing the Debian packages like OpenOffice, Transmission BitTorrent client and mp3 codecs etc., to RedHat, which is required to be installed manually or from the 3 rd party repository.
2. Bug/Issue fixing: The RedHat issue generally takes a considerable amount of time to get resolved as it is controlled and QA by a smaller community of RedHat employees, whereas bug fixing for Debian is much quicker as people from the Debian community is available in different geography and are dedicated to resolving it sooner.
3. Release updates convenience: RedHat updating releases are generally six months or more time taking. A user finds the updating process really tuff, where you need to reinstall everything. On the other hand, the Debian updates are very frequent (on a daily basis) and pretty easier and takes a couple of clicks.
4. Debian is more advanced and intelligent for differentiating between configuration files and other files. This result in easy installation. Here in Debian, the untouched files are updated automatically, whereas the configuration files that need user permission are modified as per the user’s decision. This feature lacks in RedHat.

RedHat vs Debian Comparison Table

Below is the topmost comparison

RedHat

Debian

Conclusion

Server maintenance is very costly, and this applies to any company, no matter its size. The bigger the company, the more challenges will be there. Apart from server maintaining, other factors that contribute to challenges before a best-fit solution covers your organization is application stability, enterprise edition and its features, cost of installation. The intention is RedHat is stable and secure, but genuinely speaking, the Enterprise edition of RedHat makes your company spend thousands of bucks and, to some extent, get outdated software which makes it less preferable for companies. Debian popularity worldwide and its global acceptance due to ease of operation makes it preferable to many companies.

This Debian vs RedHat article covers some of the very critical deciding factors, which in my sense, clearly go in favour of Debian. One may disagree with this Debian vs RedHat article discussion, but one cannot escape the truth. The only intention behind this Debian vs RedHat article is to throw some lights on the availabilities and things both lack in terms of business and users. Each has its pro’s and cons. All the Debian distributions available presently are just because of the supportive community and user group.

Recommended Article

This has been a guide to the top difference between RedHat vs Debian. Here we also discuss the RedHat vs Debian key differences with infographics and comparison table. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –