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'feature complete' for ages and the standards processes that change client/server interactions are very, very slow - so outdated versions of server software is not a problem as long as bug/security fixes are made.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 work and a Mac at home as desktops and use their applications for 'typical' desktop work so I avoid the issue completely (along with the ubiquitous Nvidia driver problems and lack of media codecs) and run NX/freenx to access CentOS hosts for development and server management. This gives me a full Centos desktop with good performance when/where I want it, with the ability to disconnect and reconnect with everything running, but without being limited to old, free software versions. If I didn't have the commercial apps available, I'd almost certainly need to run some current distribution for desktop use.