For my vps I had no choice. I wanted a managed package from the zone folks and turns out you can have any os you want as long as it's centos. kind of crazy, doesn't make too much sense to me, I guess it's just easier to manage.

I use fedora at home and was hoping to get that, but i would have had to get a non-managed package and i'm all about offloading my grunt work to the host.

is there much of a difference really between the os on a dedicated server and a vps? is there stuff that comes by default on a dedi that you don't get with a vps?