CentOS - is it really that bad?

Thanks for the responses. Some of the people suggesting that CentOS was poor like to have the very latest builds of everything they run so I guess it's unsuitable for them hence their negative attitude towards it.
 
I guess a good summary is that CentOS is a great stable OS, but not necessarily cutting edge on features.

Cutting edge, often means unstable. I use Fedora on both my home server and desktop and it does get broken slightly every now and again due to buggy updates.
 
alexdrans said:
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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CentOS is actually a fairly poor server OS the way most people install it actually, it always seems to be installed with support for hardware and features you'll never ever use on a server (bluetooth - really??). It's a nice stable desktop platform for business though if you have developers working on Linux, most people running Linux on the desktop are 'enthusiasts' who must have the latest and best though, so have little experience of that requirement.

CentOS is a very reasonable choice for a stable Linux desktop though. Sure ubuntu or Fedora is more up to date and plain Debian is faster but CentOS has a place, it'll be a better place when it catches up with RHEL and v6 appears...
 
bigredshark said:
CentOS is actually a fairly poor server OS the way most people install it actually, it always seems to be installed with support for hardware and features you'll never ever use on a server (bluetooth - really??).........
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Any sysadmin worth his salt won't be running unnecessary services like bluetooth, they'll have highly tailored kickstart-based builds which remove bucket loads of packages and disable meaningless services. So, I think your statement is a little misleading in part.
CentOS is a clone of RHEL and thus is primarily targeted at server platforms, all others are secondary. CentOS may be a good choice for a stable desktop OS but only providing you pick your hardware very wisely (e.g; think workstations from big name vendors).

On a side note, I think Canonical are doing quite well for developer desktops at the moment. An up-to-date distribution with reasonable lifecycle and commercial support from Canonical.
 
I must admit to never having been a fan of CentOS, funny really as I started out really liking, and spending a lot of time with the early RedHat (1.0 - 4.1) releases.

I must admit that with every new CentOS release, I download it and install it in a VM and play with it for a few days before going back to OpenSuse.
I'll probably give the rest of the 5.x a miss and wait for a RH6 based release due?
 
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