D Steward wrote:
OK ... this is silly
CentOS is an Enterprise distro and works great as a workstation. In fact, it is just as good as Ubuntu for a desktop. I would argue that a stable, supported for several year desktop is much better than a distro that upgrades every 6 months.
I've been starting to ascribe to your opinion.
For several years now, I've used CentOS on my servers and fedora on my laptop and desktop computer. However, F6 and onwards have been a bit flaky to install, with myriad little things going wrong which needed some TLC which no beginner could possibly do. And just last month when I went to install F8 on my laptop since F7 was EOL, the darned thing consistently segfaulted, despite the media passing OK, and my laptop being a bog-standard 4 year old HP corporate centrino-powered which is certified RH3-compatible. The only way I could do it was via the LiveCD :/ And then I had lots of little things going wrong on the install like vital rpms not being installed by yum which I had to do by hand since yum refused to even acknowledge they were available. :-X In 6 months time I'll have to do it all again to install F9 which by many accounts is a POS, freezing up for several minutes at a time for no apparent reason. So IMO, having used Fedora since about FC3, stability is getting worse - each version is more and more on the bleeding edge, too unpolished, too unfinished - definitely not suitable for beginners unless they have someone to hold their hand and pick up the pieces.
Ubuntu has its own problems. While it is slightly less cutting-edge than F9 and thus easier to install, the forums are huge and unwieldy. Every problem that one can possibly have, has already been answered by 100,000
- people in 10,000+ threads. The noobs outnumber the proficient users by
100 to 1, so finding the right solution to your problem is a real challenge in that 95% (my estimate) of the answers are wrong. So you'll spend a lot of time doing (and undoing) the advice given and backtracking from dead-ends.
In stark contrast, this list has one of the highest signal-to-noise ratios I have ever encountered, and the standard of contributors makes me feel inadequate :/ However, IMO, CentOS is still slightly too old to be used on a modern laptop, but probably fine for use on a desktop where standby and power conservation is less important. Stability of CentOS is outstanding, but still not perfect - I remember one problem from last year when I was using CentOS on a desktop and Evolution refused to start after an update. It needed a small tweak which was supplied on-list. But this problem came from upstream so also affected RedHat.
FWIW, I don't know what version of NetworkManager that CentOS uses, but the one used by F8 not only doesn't require wpa-supplicant to connect via WPA/WPA2 but many 'puters (such as my laptop) don't even need the network service running, since NW is now managing wired connections as well as wireless. It even integrates with OpenVPN now, although I am yet to try this.
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
I agree with both posters 100% [especially about the Ubuntu Forums - sometimes bigger isn't always better :-) ] I started using linux with Red Hat 6.2 and I stayed w/ Fedora until around FC3, and that's when things started going downhill. I ended up being the classical distro-hopper for some time trying to find what would work for me, and I ended up using CentOS on my desktop workstation, and I use a small lesser-known distro called Foresight Linux on my Laptop - it's very up-to-date, has a unique and wonderful package manager and is far more stable than either Fedora or Ubuntu.
That combination works very well for me.