On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Jesús García González wrote:

What are the disadvantages (if any) of using CentOS as a desktop (as it is seen more like a server oriented distro being a clone of RHEL)

You won't have the latest desktop developments (udev, 2.6, Gnome 2.8, xorg, HW support) and desktop applications that some expect for a desktop.

When CentOS 4 will be released, most of this will be solved and there is less need to have the latest developments as the desktop really has matured the last year.

I hope CentOS 4 will finally allow me to recommend Linux to family members without the overhead of upgrading every 4 to 6 months.

-- dag wieers, dag@wieers.com, http://dag.wieers.com/ -- [all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 11:19 -0500, Jesús García González wrote:

Hello all,

What are the disadvantages (if any) of using CentOS as a desktop (as it is seen more like a server oriented distro being a clone of RHEL)

Best wishes, J

Basically, RedHat has released several different Enterprise offerings ... the AS Server has all packages. The other releases (ES server, Desktop, Professional Workstation, etc.) are a subset of these packages.

So, from that perspective, CentOS-3 is as good as RedHat Desktop.

What some others here are mentioning is that the packages are outdated. That is a concern if you want the latest bells and whistles. If you don't need the latest bells and whistles, it works great.

I use CentOS-3 as the desktop for several people (including me) in production and I haven't had any problems. When CentOS-4 beta is released, try it as a test Desktop ... I just shifted my main workstation at home from Gentoo to CentOS-4 Beta, and I haven't had any major issues.

Since CentOS is a RHEL clone, there will not be any major upgrade in the components once the OS has been released ... so towards the end of the development cycle it will seem very old.

But every 12-18 months there should be a new Enterprise distro for the desktop, so it isn't to bad.