Its been about almost more then two years since I have been playing with CentOS on many different platforms etc. Its very stable but on the other hand, PHP/MySQL updates are very hard to get and still PHP is 5.1.6. I tried EPEL repo and it updated PHP to 5.3.1 but still there were conflicts with stuff and many core packages.
So, I thought why not move to Ubuntu since it has just announced 10.04LTS (Long Term Support) in April 2010. Folks at iWeb were really nice to do a reinstall without any charges and also process a memory upgrade request at an amazing 50% discount.
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
- Apache 2 version is 2.2.14
- PHP version is 5.3.2
- MySQL version is 5.1.41-3ubuntu12
- SVN (Subversion) version is 1.6.6
As a comparison CentOS 5.4 has the following versions
- Apache 2 version is 2.2.3
- PHP version is 5.1.6
- MySQL version is 5.0.77
- SVN (Subversion) version is 1.4.2
So if you are a PHP developer looking to deploy a Linux flavour on your new box, choose Ubuntu 
Related posts:
Ubuntu is always the best choice on desktop, and server editions are also getting room now.
Why not debian?
Never tried it mate. But PHP version is 5.2.x there, Im mostly working on leading-edge (5.3.2 as of now)
Thank you for providing detailed comparison.
You are most welcome