Niki Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
Allow me to shortly introduce myself, since I'm new to this list. I'm an Austrian sysadmin living in Montpezat (South France). I'm in charge of
G'day
An important thing to understand about CentOS is that it's not _exactly_ a distribution in its own right. It's one of several built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, and aims to be pretty much a drop-in replacement for it.
The major distinguishing feature of these RHEL clones is the support: if one has the real thing, then (with few exceptions) one also has the paid-for support.
If you don't want to pay the RH fees, then CentOS is a good choice. You won't have official RH support (or costs), and you won't have the certifications regarding compatibility with other vendors (such as Oracle), but as far as packaging and performance are concerned, it's determined by RH.
There are some additional packages available for CentOS, but don't expec those packages which RH ships to be built or packaged differently.
Off-hand, I don't know of a clone that seeks to package those packages differently. It's not something I'd counsel.
For something a little different but a little like CentOS, take a look at Fedora.
Fedora has more packages and it has more recent technology, but it's no featherweight either. And, I generally describe it as a rolling beta - it's a development (as in developing RHEL) platform, and it's perfectly possible that your system won't boot after some update (typically kernel).
You might also take a look at Kubuntu (and Edubuntu for different reasons), both built from Debian. Like Fedora, there are regular new releases, and mostly the supported life is fairly short, but like RHEL there are occasional long life versions.
SUSE has a similar model to RH/Fedora , except that (AFAIK) the long-life (aka enterprise) versions cost and I've not heard of any clones. The free version is OpenSUSE and they must be planning on releasing 10.3 or 11.0 RSN.
But really, this is more a user question;-)