The main difference is how packages (rpm vs. deb) are installed (yum vs. apt-get) and also perhaps what comes pre-installed with each system.
Installation
CentOS 7 comes with a graphical installer, that gives you a list of options of what you want. I went for the GNOME desktop option.
Partitioning: by default it will go with the LVM scheme using the XFS filesystem. I modified mine to ext4 (you can read more here), and the layout is like this (for 2TB HDD, sda has Windows 7/8 pre-installed).
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb4 48G 261M 46G 1% / devtmpfs 63G 0 63G 0% /dev tmpfs 63G 290M 63G 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 63G 18M 63G 1% /run tmpfs 63G 0 63G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup /dev/sdb3 96G 6.6G 85G 8% /usr /dev/sdb5 48G 58M 46G 1% /tmp /dev/sdb7 20G 1.2G 17G 7% /var /dev/sdb2 494M 94M 401M 19% /boot /dev/sdb1 200M 9.6M 191M 5% /boot/efi /dev/sdb8 1.6T 31G 1.5T 3% /home /dev/sda3 1.9T 239G 1.6T 13% /run/media/diana/OS
Packages and repositories
You will need the EPEL repo for many packages
wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm rpm -ivh epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm
Some key packages I had to install to bring the fresh installation up to speed.
sudo yum install ntfs-3g libxml2 libxml2-devel libcurl libcurl-devel scipy
Bioinformatics/stats-related
More to come soon.
