[CentOS] CentOS vs Fedora?

[Les Mikesell]

Lanny Marcus wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 6:31 PM, David Suhendrik <david at pnyet.web.id> wrote:
>> I'm newbie and i want to know Your opinion about CentOS vs Fedora, hopefully
>> this isn't make a flame, and just to curious..
>> Actucally now I'm using CentOS as some servers. ^_^'
> 
> Catching up on reading the list and here are my 2 cents: We started
> out using Red Hat Linux on our home desktops. Then we tried several
> versions of Fedora, years ago. Some with excellent results and some
> with bad results. Using CentOS now and it's a winner. If you have some
> very recent HW, or a Laptop,  you may need to use Fedora, but if not,
> CentOS is the way to go, IMHO. Test your boxes with a CentOS LiveCD
> before you do an install onto bare metal, to be sure it will run OK on
> your HW.  If you need the latest and greatest, this isn't the distro
> you want, but if you want long life, stability and security, this is
> the way to go.

Unfortunately you often want a different tradeoff between stability and 
features in the base OS and the applications you use and the way 
distributions are packaged makes it difficult to get both right all the 
time.  In the first year or maybe even two after a CentOS version is 
released, the applications aren't two badly out of date.  After that, 
you are happy that your system isn't crashing but you'll start to miss 
the features that are included in fresher releases and probably start to 
run into bugs that won't ever have the fixes backed into the old 
application versions.  Sometimes you can find newer versions on 3rd 
party sites like rpmforge, sometimes you can build your own (both with 
some risk) and sometimes you just put up with what's there knowing you 
are years behind current development.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com