The core developers of FreeSWITCH run CentOS and are better at handling issues should they arise on platforms they use. CentOS is enterprise by design so it is slow on software updates and the like but to some that is an advantage versus more current edge distributions. FreeSWITCH ships many libraries bundled with the software to cope with the disparity in versions packaged/provided across distros. If a machine is only running FreeSWITCH you don't really need very much outside of what is provided by CentOS and FreeSWITCH by itself. More exotic tasks you hit the limitations that CentOS does not distribute packages for everything due to it's policies upstream. There are options to address those such as community repositories. -- W PS: If you really hate yum you can use apt on CentOS =)