bashton Business Focused Open Source

Whilst it's fair to say a distribution is more than just the sum of its packages, there can be no doubt that they are one of the most important aspects to consider when choosing which is most appropriate. Here we will look at two important metrics - the overall number of packages supported, and the freshness of those packages.

Distribution	Number of included packages
Red Hat Enterprise	3045
CentOS	3223
Ubuntu	5877
Debian	17740
SuSE Enterprise	2339

Looking at this table, Debian's comparatively short security support lifecycle is thrown into context - they're supporting more than five times the number of packages as Red Hat, the distributor with the longest support lifetime. This means that all the applications you're running are more likely to be pre-packaged, and as such easier to install and support.

Freshness of Packages

The number of packages and length of security support means nothing if the provided packages are lacking the features you require. I'd urge some caution here - firstly, is a newer but less well tested version really better than an older but more widely used one? Secondly, often performance enhancements and other smaller improvements are backported from newer versions, negating some of the benefits of a higher version. Thirdly, how 'fresh' a distribution appears is probably most dependent on where one is in a release cycle - if there's another release iminent, as with Debian, it's perhaps not surprising that the packages from the current version appear older.

I've provided example version numbers from widely used packages below. RHEL and CentOS have been amalgamated, as they are exactly the same, as you'd expect.

Distribution	RHEL/CentOS 5.2	Debian (Etch)	Ubuntu (Hardy)	SLES 10SP2
Apache	2.2.3	2.2.3	2.2.8	2.2.3
MySQL	5.0.45	5.0.32	5.0.51a	5.0.26
Python	2.4.3	2.4.2	2.5.2	2.4.2
PHP	5.1.6	5.2.0	5.2.4	5.2.5
Tomcat	5.5.23	5.5.20	5.5.25	5.0.30