The key difference IMO is that CentOS is derived from RHEL, a distro built mainly with server applications in mind (you can tell a lot of things like directory structures and packaging were designed for easier&#x2F;repeatable&#x2F;automated configuration), while Ubuntu was (and is still?) primarily targeting UI-based use cases, or more &#x27;end&#x2F;single-user friendly&#x27; use cases.<p>Case in point, why does MySQL automatically get started (in an insecure state, mind you) when installing from the official repos on Ubuntu? And standard Apache and Nginx configuration patterns (and the changes from 10-12-14.04) sometimes make me want to give up supporting Deb&#x2F;Ubuntu!