CentOS - is it really that bad?

Phil99

Phil99

Phil99

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At university the preferred operating system is either Windows or CentOS; I've currently got Windows Vista on my lab machine and for my work it's pretty terrible so I've requested a change to CentOS.

When mentioning this to others I get shocked reactions as to why on earth their preferred distro is CentOS and one person even compared it to Windows ME.

Is it really that bad? For my work I can't see the distribution really being that much of an issue, but I'm just curious as to why people would have such negative feelings towards it? :confused:
 
CentOS/RHEL isn't the best choice for a desktop/workstation as for stability's sake it is generally a bit behind the times, but for servers it's right up there.
 
CentOS primarily uses Gnome, so the desktop experience is near enough identical to nearly all other distros. Whoever is acting shocked and comparing it to Windows ME is a typical noob thinking they know what they're talking about :) It's a clone of RHEL, which is used by the vast majority of big businesses where they require Linux.
 
AndrewP said:
CentOS/RHEL isn't the best choice for a desktop/workstation as for stability's sake it is generally a bit behind the times, but for servers it's right up there.
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I think stability is the wrong word there and I'd argue its a good choice for workstations. Hardware support for consumer desktops/notebooks on the other hand is the main reason not to run it on your desktop, depending on your job and associated hardware :)
 
AndrewP said:
CentOS/RHEL isn't the best choice for a desktop/workstation as for stability's sake it is generally a bit behind the times, but for servers it's right up there.
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Stability being completely the wrong word there. CentOS is basically RHEL with the Red Hat branding removed and hence is as stable as that OS, (and seeing as how widely RHEL is used in business as a stable, enterprise grade OS ....)

It is likely to be behind on compatibility on new hardware and cutting edge desktop apps as that not the market area it's focused on.
 
A stable set of packages, not server stability! It's still on Firefox 3.0 and php 5.1, for example, which will improve if they ever get 5.6 or 6 released.
 
Yeah,

My only issue with CentOS was that it is pretty behind on some things (integration of advanced format 4K sector compatible partitioning tools was the killer for me) but I never had a stability issue on my home machine which was used as a virtual machine host (OpenVM) and later as a NAS.

I only moved to Fedora due to the newer kernal supporting GParted which will partition my new WD Green drives without all the playing around.

CentOS is cut down a bit in terms of what is installed as default but you can, for the most part, get it in line with Fedora if you wish fairly easily as long as you know what packages to install.

I have never had any big issues with Ubuntu either though but just happen to prefer the RHEL based versions as the utility and config file placement in the filesystem just seems more logical to me.

It depends on what you use CentOS at Uni for. If you need to get to the command line then it would make more sense to use a RHEL based distro like CentOS or Fedora as using a Debian based distro may lead to confusion from a sys admin view if you are not familiar with both.

RB
 
I'd say centos is very stable for workstation, it has great hardware support. What people don't like is that they usually want more up to date stuff, and then they break the stability.

Because lets face it if you like linux, you'll want to add EPEL, and then rpmforge, and then you'll end up with a lot of badly compiled software that will eventually clog and break the system.

But if you can resist the temptation and run with year old software, it's a rock :-)
 
CentOS is brilliant, the only problem with it (and all RHEL distros) from my experience is they cack bricks whenever they are ungracefully shut down. Its in no way a desktop OS btw. If you want a Red Hat-esque desktop environment go for Fedora.

I personally use Debian based desktop OS's as I find the package repo's are much better than with yum.
 
The major versions of packages generally stay the same over the course of a RHEL/CentOS release which can mean they're a bit out of date.
 
Just installed a couple of servers with centOS and I really like it. Talking to people about linux distros is usually an invitation for irrational and ill-informed views. You wont have any issues using it in all likelihood. If you do, just pop something else on there.
 
SMN said:
CentOS is brilliant, the only problem with it (and all RHEL distros) from my experience is they cack bricks whenever they are ungracefully shut down. Its in no way a desktop OS btw. If you want a Red Hat-esque desktop environment go for Fedora.

I personally use Debian based desktop OS's as I find the package repo's are much better than with yum.
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LOL. Cause running ext3/4 with barriers disabled like on ubuntu makes it much better at recovering after an unsuccessfull shutdown... btw RHEL5 only lets you use ext3 which while slow, most kernel devs will agree it's rock solid. (also it's terrible on SSD's but thats a different story).

I actually like rpm much more than deb, although thats a personal thing. I mean one spec file is much better than all the individual control files in .deb's IMHO. Also zypper has the best dep resolver ever :-)
 
Not had any problems with RHEL/CentOS after an unclean closed down personally but it will of course depend a lot on what the system is doing at the time. Ext3 on RHEL5 isn't particularly slow but ext4 on RHEL6 is quite a lot quicker in our benchmarking (Ext3 is slower though on RHEL6 than on RHEL5). Although we haven't signed off RHEL6 for internal production use yet.

I prefer RPM to DEB files ... and having spent most of the last couple of months putting in a patch repository infrastructure I've been having to do a lot with YUM and RPM files :)
 
I run CentOS on my server and Ubuntu on the desktop. I like CentOS, and given that Red Hat(unlike many others) actually makes money from open source, it would seem so do many others.

There is something slightly comical about a Vista user looking down their nose at another OS.
 
brendan said:
LOL. Cause running ext3/4 with barriers disabled like on ubuntu makes it much better at recovering after an unsuccessfull shutdown... btw RHEL5 only lets you use ext3 which while slow, most kernel devs will agree it's rock solid. (also it's terrible on SSD's but thats a different story).

I actually like rpm much more than deb, although thats a personal thing. I mean one spec file is much better than all the individual control files in .deb's IMHO. Also zypper has the best dep resolver ever :-)
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Well i used to deploy RHEL servers for a living (Granted it was about 3 years ago now), and I know how miserable they can be with power cuts (normally 1 in 5 times it required a real "faff" to get it back up and running).

I dont mind using RPM for servers, dont get me wrong. My only bug bear with it is with desktop environments, when you go "Oh id like to install compiz" (for example), in Ubuntu/deb you go "apt-get install easypackage" and it goes away and does; in RPM i found more often than not I was compiling from source every time and fighting dependency hell.

Thats the main reason I moved from F13 to Ubuntu 10.10 and havent looked back if im being honest (note: this is my desktop!).

As for servers, i'd still recommend Cent OS as the best thing out there for a general purpose linux box. Rock solid for stability (providing your fuse box isnt up and down like a hores drawers).
 
SMN said:
I dont mind using RPM for servers, dont get me wrong. My only bug bear with it is with desktop environments, when you go "Oh id like to install compiz" (for example), in Ubuntu/deb you go "apt-get install easypackage" and it goes away and does; in RPM i found more often than not I was compiling from source every time and fighting dependency hell.

Thats the main reason I moved from F13 to Ubuntu 10.10 and havent looked back if im being honest (note: this is my desktop!).
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That's what package managers are for, such as yum. apt-get is a package manager, so you can't really argue deb vs. RPM with that.

RPM dependency hell has been long gone now we have decent package managers.
 
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Exactly, you want to use a package manager like yum instead of using rpm directly. Then assuming you have your repositories set up correctly you can install things easily and dependencies are sorted for you, i.e.

yum install packagename

will install packagename (which could be a group name) along with any dependencies from the repositories it requires. We have local mirrors of the OS DVD repositories, update repositories and several other misc repositories we need setup and accessible on the lan over HTTP. Hence to install something from the repositories you just run a command like the above when your yum.conf has been configured correctly. And

yum list updates
yum update

to patch the server.
 
I've always considered CentOS to be a server OS. It's strange to see it used primarily on a desktop.

Using CentOS shouldn't restrict you if you know what you're doing. As it has already been said, Linux distros are quite similar.
 
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