Debian 9.2 released

> No, it sounds like a protocol problem to me. How do I state in an HTTP request: "I speak English and German; if you can serve both and the article was written in one and translated to the other, then give me the original please".

That is a problem with the quality of the translation/translators - not the protocol. The protocol is neutral on languages and considers all versions as equivalent, it only expects that you would pick one. The specific behaviour you are expecting can be trivially built into the server side without modifying the current protocol.

1) One reason would be that increasingly often, when you search for some rhel/centos problem, the solution is behind a paywall at access.redhat.com. Not that I blame RH, they are a commercial company and need to make money somehow. Or similarly, you get a search hit for bugzilla.redhat.com, but it turns out that the bug has been marked customers only, so you can't access it unless you have a RHEL subscription.

2) For major and minor releases, they are months behind RH. That may or may not be a problem for you, though.

3) Debian is less beholden to the interests of any one corporate entity (for better or worse), if that kind of thing appeals to you.

4) Debian has a huge number of packages, much more than CentOS + EPEL.

5) On the fly upgrade to the next release. Though in a professional setting where you have automated provisioning, reinstall isn't that much of a burden anyway.

That being said, both CentOS and Debian are very solid distros, you're not going wrong if you choose one of them.

* Debian pushes security fixes really fast (I remember a local root exploit being patch in less than a day in debian while I waited a few more days on CentOS)

* The general tooling is far better, lately, for example, I played with the tools used to build packages in clean chroots of each distributions: mock for CentOS, cowbuilder for Debian, cowbuilder is a lot more powerful, copy on right support, ability to build several packages in parallel, more switches in the cli arguments... mock is far more limited even if it does the job. Also I love reportbug, even if it seems antiquated at first (bug tracker based on emails, wtf!?), it's really really really convenient as it automatically grabs the information regarding the buggy package (logs, version, dependencies version...) and let you simply review it.

* Debian as more packages available, even compared to CentOS+Epel

* Debian as backports if you really need newer versions of a package

* If you want/need to be on the bleeding edge, sid (or unstable) is a great rolling release.

* Debian does a better job at maintaining stable version of a given software (I remember a few years ago, CentOS/RHEL updated OpenLDAP server to the latest version, which broke my directory on my (dev, fortunately) infrastructure due to a change in configuration format, this never happened to me on Debian).

* If you have relatively clean upstream, packaging is nearly automatic on Debian thanks to all the dh_

* at least until CentOS 6, yum was a slow and fragile beast IMHO, apt being more robust and less susceptible to corrupt its DB in case of crash or interruptions. It seems to have gotten better with CentOS 7 however and I never played with dnf.

On the minus side compared to CentOS:

* kickstart is a dream to use compared to preseed which is quite horrible, specially if you are trying to template it.

* The life span of a CentOS/RHEL is really long, +10 years for latest releases, which can be great for long, complex and slow projects, Debian in contrast is more on an EOL after ~5 years policy.

It is actually so frustrating that I decided to go with fedora in my latest trial. It changes every time you click a link, so even if you manage to find the correct link, one click and it is back to whatever language you have at top of browser setting.

Sure, I know Accept-Language, as should be pretty clear from the discussion. Are you implying that the web is supposed to provide a shitty user experience?

In my opinion, there is very limited applicability of Accept-Language. Just because this header exists does not mean you need to make use of it at the slightest perceived opportunity (If all you have is a hammer...).