Does Anyone Use CentOS

[Vince4Amy]

Are there any CentOS user around on this forum? I always use CentOS on the family computers for the stability, software choices, support life cycle and overall speed of the OS. I think that CentOS is one of the most stable distros.

[Yashiro]

Then you'd feel more at home on a forum about CentOS I imagine.

[Vince4Amy]

Then you'd feel more at home on a forum about CentOS I imagine.

I was just wondering if anyone else used it that's all I don't really see much about it on this forum or on Other OS Talk.

[albandy]

I only used centos throught Rocks Cluster, a centos based distribution to run on heterogeneous clusters.

[gnomeuser]

CentOS is a very stable product, if it wasn't for it's limited amount of packages (without EPEL and rpmfusion) and often old versions of software which is unsupported by upstream.

That latter part worries me since CentOS doesn't come with a service contract (like RHEL one which it is based) and upstream generally will refuse to fix old versions. I am not sure I would feel comfortable putting my mother in front of that. You would pretty much be left to the whim of the community, which is nowhere as big as for say openSUSE or Ubuntu.

Another concern is the lack of good upgrade experience for security and other updates. It pretty much needs to download those in the background and install them for mom and pops if there is no one around to do administration. I know my mother at least comes running everytime the computer asks anything, however little and even if she only has one option.

It's a balancing act, with upgrades often causing regressions one has to be careful deciding on a course of action. If the machine to be unattended picking a 6 month cycle distro is not advisable, and yet something with a 7 year cycle like CentOS may not support all of their gadgets (I know my mother at least likes the little mp3 player I gave her for audiobooks, along with the camera for vacation photos) and might not take advantage of the latest technology which often make things work better and easier.

Overall I think something like Ubuntu LTS is a good compromise, that specific solution though requires a few more cycles to prove itself and ensure that the support structure is in place. Ubuntu is still very young in this arena and still needs time to gather experience in what is supportable and how.

[Vince4Amy]

I would use Fedora but it's upgrade cycle has got to be one of the shortest I've ever seen. Isn't it something like version 9 stops being supported 1 month after 11 is released and 10 one month after 12 is released etc?

[gnomeuser]

I would use Fedora but it's upgrade cycle has got to be one of the shortest I've ever seen. Isn't it something like version 9 stops being supported 1 month after 11 is released and 10 one month after 12 is released etc?

Fedora is supported for 2 cycles plus one month from release. Typically this works out to 13 months. The upgrade path is pretty smooth and well tested though, you can even do it without downloading the ISO thanks to PreUpgrade (yum install preupgrade).

It's not intended to be supported over years and years, it's a fast moving technology engine. I don't blame them for that decision, it's not intended for production use and they admit so readily.

[Vince4Amy]

It's not intended to be supported over years and years, it's a fast moving technology engine. I don't blame them for that decision, it's not intended for production use and they admit so readily.

Exactly, that is what CentOS (RHEL) is for. And yes Upgrading Fedora always seems to work great here.