Goodbye Fedora and hello Centos?

[Dave Gutteridge]

    I was unable to resolve my problems in reading DVD drives in Fedora 
4. So, I decided to switch to another distribution. I saw on one site 
that the three distros being nominated for best distribution by user's 
vote were Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora Core. I tried Ubuntu, but the 
installer kept failing. So I went to CentOS.
    Anyway, long story short, CentOS looks and feels just like Fedora, 
and it reads all my DVD drives normally, so I think I could be happy 
with it.
    But...
    When I tried to install Xine, using yum, it said it could not find 
it. And then I went looking for an RPM for Xine, and they're all for Red 
Hat or Fedora. I tried installing an RPM for Fedora anyway, reasoning 
that maybe they were the same in more than just looks, but no dice.
    As I looked around the net, it seems that applications all seem to 
have specific builds for Red Hat, Fedora, a couple of Debian builds... 
but no CentOS. Going by the amount of available information and support, 
Fedora is the primary Linux distribution, and CentOS hardly even exists.
    Can't I have it all? Stability, the ability to read my DVD drives, 
*and* a variety of applications?
    Further, why is everything being built for Fedora if it's some kind 
of experimental build not ideal for consumer use (as was explained to me 
on this very list)?

    What's the deal here?

Dave