Moving distro?

[quickfix]

Getting a new computer and looking to run some flavour of linux as the main os. Now, I'm used to CentOS, which I run on a sever I maintain. I just wondered how easy it would be for me to keep running CentOS on the server and have, say, debian on the home computer. All of what I do for the server is obviously through shell, and I'd probably want, in theory, to be able to do anything and everything through a console on the home distro.

I dunno why I wanna change really, I guess I'm just a bit bored of CentOS.

Opinions welcome, but please, it's a "how hard is it to change" thread, not a chance to wax lyrical about how Gentoo isn't half the operationg system that Ubuntu is.

 

[Vonhelmet]

If you're comfortable learning a bit, then it's a good idea to try a different distro and get to grips with the different ways they handle things. You've already got a RedHat based one under your belt, so getting into a Debian based one will broaden your knowledge and experience.

To be honest, if you're just using it on the desktop, and you install one of the many user friendly variants (Knoppix, Ubuntu, etc) then it's not too hard to get into it as it's all fairly hand-holdy.

 

[pinkegobox]

and if my understanding is correct, if you've got your home drive in a seperate partition, then upgrading OS is a simple task. I've just installed gentoo on my spare machine (took 24hours though compiling most the stuff downloaded, although from a stage3) and then spent another day setting Xgl/compiz setup, and i must say i'm very impressed. not tried using linux as a proper desktop OS since mandrake 8 :S

there's plenty of online help for most distro's, but if you want to swap personally' i'd stay with one of the _main_ distros; gentoo, debian, fedora, suse, slackware ... although personally i can't stand suse. i think distro depends on how much want to "experiment and learn" or how much you just want an OS that works? gentoo for the learning experience as something about it makes you want to use the command line for everything, similar to slackware in that respect i believe. debian for a very stable, if not a little old, so no bleeding edge features, not normally a problem unless you have brand spanking new hardware. and fedora/suse/ubuntu for a relatively "easy-going" gui environment.

and ssh will work the same on any distro, so won't be a problem connecting to your centOS machines whichever path you take.