Les Mikesell wrote:
On 1/19/2011 9:13 AM, John Hodrien wrote:
On Wed, 19 Jan 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
CentOS would likely only be used as a desktop OS by people who also run servers and like everything to be the same. They all assemble approximately the same set of upstream packages, though, so it is
possible to make
them all do the same things with varying amounts of work in finding
current
packages that might be missing in the base distribution.
I do think CentOS gets unreasonably knocked as a desktop OS. I definitely don't use it on desktops *because* I run it on servers.
The difference is that open source server software has been 'feature complete' for ages and the standards processes that change client/server interactions are very, very slow - so outdated versions of server software is not a problem as long as bug/security fixes are made. That's not true for desktop applications and environments. If you don't have something current you are missing the improvements that many thousands of man-hours of work have made. Personally, I use Windows at
<snip> I'll disagree here: I've seen hardly any "improvements" in any of the (admittedly not a lot) of software I run. As a definition of this, let me note that in '95, PC Mag ran a review of word processors, and noted that 90% of the users (then) used only 10% of the features, and the other 10% of users who *did* use those features only used them about 10% of the time.
The last "oh, I like this" feature I can remember was when firefox introduced tabs. On the other hand, a *lot* of "improvements" I find more and more objectionable, such as thunderbird trying *very* hard to look and act more and more like Lookout, er, Outlook, and I *LOATHE* the latest versions of Outlook.
mark