There are several Linux distributions(e.g. Ubuntu, CentOs, Debian e.t.c) available when provisioning an ECS instance on Alibaba Cloud. What is your experience with them and which option would you recommend for hosting a website or web application?
Centos or Ubuntu. I prefer Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
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Debian is cool if you don’t mind some lower level steps in setting things up. Gives you maybe more control.
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I used to use CentOS and liked it a lot. It’s very stable and there are lots of recourses on how to set things up.
At the company I work at now we picked Ubuntu because more developers are familiar with that than with CentOS so there is less learning to be done overall. Ubuntu is also very stable and I think has even more resources than CentOS.
The main thing I like in CentOS over Ubuntu is that it uses yum instead of apt for package management. I’ve never particularly liked apt and its fist first approach: it will you just run and leave you to clean up the mess if it fails, whereas yum does a dry run first to see if the install would succeed and cancel if it doesn’t without actually destroying your system first.
Debian is what Ubuntu is based on and it’s great, extremely stable, but doesn’t have modern versions of basically anything as they have a very long vetting process of packages the add. That’s also why it’s extremely stable.
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Second that about apt mess.
Reminds me of old Windows when you had to periodically clean the registry from the installation mess with different “cleaners”
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