[CentOS] Troubles for an non-IT beginner

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Jan 19 16:13:21 UTC 2011


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interactions are very, very slow - so outdated versions of server 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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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