I'm a sysadmin by trade, so in my daily work I get to try out all kinds of new technology including operating systems. Over the last year I've noticed that many other distros won't run on some of my hardware (e.g. a Thinkpad T61, Dell E510, GX620) at work and home. But CentOS does. Without fail. Every time (well, there's that old Dell Inspiron 1200 that sits in the kitchen... but we won't go there). Last night I had a hard disk crash on one of my home boxes, so I decided to use it as an opportunity to try out another well known RHEL clone that is also currently at v5.3. Although the md5sum on the disk checked out it wouldn't even boot. I then tried their Live CD. Still no good. So for good measure I tried the latest (v9.x) from another project (you know, the one with the orange and brown color scheme). NG.
So the question is, what is CentOS doing *right*?
A very sincere thanks to the CentOS project team for all their hard work in making a distro I know I can always rely on.