I've been a big fan of CentOS for a while, and didn't have many issues with CentOS 4.X over the past few years. However, since moving to CentOS 5.1 a few weeks ago, I have received more problem reports from my users than in the last year and a half on CentOS 4.X. I've previously reported the problem with gnome-terminal crashing (and since there is a single gnome-terminal process by default all your terminal windows disappear which makes this really painful), and now I'm getting multiple reports of Gnome applets suddenly quitting. Sometimes this includes the entire screen "flashing" (probably a side effect of the "Show Desktop" applet exiting). I've also had reports of some third party tools like SlickEdit misbehaving and/or crashing on CentOS 5.1.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not really complaining about CentOS. I really appreciate what the CentOS team does. I am just wondering if anyone else has seen these issues. If it was just one or two users, I would suspect the hardware or some configuration issues. But these issues started cropping up after I upgraded our existing systems to CentOS 5.1. The "upgrade" was a complete reinstall via a kickstart script (I reformatted all partitions/LVs except for one), and all systems are configured identically. BTW, I'm using CentOS for our desktops as well as our servers, and all these problems are really confined to the desktop systems. Almost everyone uses the default Gnome desktop.
So, does anyone else have the perception that CentOS 5.X (particularly Gnome) is a little less stable than CentOS 4.X or is it just me?
Alfred