I have found red hat based distributions more restricted, than there debian counterparts. Mostly when you are trying to install you don't get to apt get from a large repository of programs you are normally limited to yum that is more limited.
Red hat is admittedly older than debian but in my opinion they are not really interested in the desktop or mobile user any more and are consintrating more on the large enterprise level systems. Think of IBM in the late 60's to early 1980, they support terminals for larger corperations over the small guy with 10 systems in his office an a server.