When comparing PureOS vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends PureOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” PureOS is ranked 18th while CentOS is ranked 48th. The most important reason people chose PureOS is:
PureBrowser is a modified version of Firefox that comes with security focused plugins. There is also a copy of TOR installed in the OS by default.
Specs
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Pros
Pro PureBrowser and TOR
PureBrowser is a modified version of Firefox that comes with security focused plugins. There is also a copy of TOR installed in the OS by default.
Pro You can download and install it, without the need to purchase their laptop
PureOS is available from their site for free for anyone to use, no need to purchase any of their laptops in order to check out the OS which is a tweaked build of the Trisquel distro.
Pro Default install on a free, open source laptop
PureOS is the default OS installed on the Purism Librem laptops.
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 No mobile installation
You cant install pure os on a android phone.
Con Slower updates
Updates are slower than an unmodified Debian.