[CentOS] 5-beta or 4.4 for a new user?

[Aleksandar Milivojevic]

Quoting Patrick Useldinger <pu.news.001 at gmail.com>:

> Hello,
>
> I am a Slackware user who's interested in learning CentOS. At this
> point  it is for intellectual curiosity only and not for any real work
> so the machine need not be 100% stable at this point. It's most
> probably going to be an installation into VMWare.
>
> Given that, I thought I'd wait for 5-beta (mid-Jan'07) and start with that.
>
> Will it be possible to upgrade from 5-beta to 5.0?
> Or would you advise me to start with 4.4?

Beta is for people who already use version 4 and want to have a peak  
into the next version, and/or check out if it works OK with their  
existing environments (hardware, applications, etc).  It might not be  
possible to upgrade from beta to final (Red Hat doesn't support that,  
CentOS might support it but no guaranties).

There's bunch of changes between versions 4 and 5.  If it's just for  
playing around, try out 5 beta (you can already get it from Red Hat,  
CentOS 5 beta will be preatty much the same stuff).  There's more  
features and more eye candie.  Especially for laptop users.  By the  
time you are finished with playing with it, the final version might  
already be just around the corner.  However, don't judge finished and  
stable product (version 4) by bugs in unfinished and unstable product  
(version 5 beta).

Thinking of it, if you are installing it on VmWare anyhow, install  
both.  Version 4 to check out stability (but you might be dissapointed  
with older versions of packages).  Version 5 beta to check out new  
features.