When comparing OS X Mavericks vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends CentOS for most people. In the question“What is the best laptop OS?” CentOS is ranked 37th while OS X Mavericks is ranked 59th. The most important reason people chose CentOS is:
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else. Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other. This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Battery optimization
There are many features that improve battery life, such as App Nap.
Pro Great if you don't like El Capitan and up.
Relatively fast and retains many design decisions of the OS X of old.
Pro Memory compression features
You can have a lot of things running yet have plenty of memory left.
Pro Free if you have Snow leopard or Lion
Pro Very tweakable
There are many things you can still change through the terminal.
Pro Still supported so far
Pro Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.
Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.
This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Good long term support
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
Pro Supports multiple PHP versions
You can install multiple PHP versions and have them available for different users.
Pro Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
Cons
Con Outdated OS version
No longer supported by Apple (neither bugfixes or security fixes). The last release was in 2014.
Con Slower compared to previous versions
Con Very hard to find
Apple is very keen to only show the latest version.