[CentOS] Troubles for an non-IT beginner

Wed Jan 19 15:13:41 UTC 2011
John Hodrien <J.H.Hodrien at leeds.ac.uk>

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.

All the advantages of long release cycles apply to desktops.  Despite often
thinking otherwise, many users require relatively few packages to be the
latest shiniest, so running a bleeding edge distro isn't really needed.  Even
then, a reasonably amount of software can end up being commercial, where EL5
is currently better supported than any other linux release.  Where users do
have requirements that diverge from the base OS, it's probably a good idea for
that to be satisfied out of the main OS tree anyway, as that lets you satisfy
local requirements while keeping the core identical across the board.

jh