Catharsis - slowly my FC4 world crumbles around me

[Dave Gutteridge]

I checked out CentOS, and it looks interesting.

One of the reasons I went to Fedora was because I was interested in 
getting a completely open source Linux OS. Philosophically, I'm an open 
source advocate, and I thought I should put my money where my mouth was. 
I Googled for "open source Linux" and Fedora came up more than anything 
else. In fact, at the time I did it a few months, I don't recall seeing 
any other options. I didn't come across Centos, and hadn't heard of it 
until it was mentioned here.

In any case, Fedora seems to have the biggest community, the most amount 
of interest in its development, and so on. And despite how clueless I 
must seem when it comes to my understanding of Fedora, I did read 
through the web site and it didn't give me the impression that what I 
was getting into was a lot of experimentation.
For example, it says on the download page, under the heading 
"Understanding What You Are Doing":
"You are downloading an entire operating system, and in most cases, you 
are then going to install the operating system on your computer."
I was fully mentally prepared and desiring to install an "entire 
operating system". That sounded fine.

It does *not* say "You are downloading an experimental cutting edge 
operating system which in which each new version will be trying out 
things that are just as likely to not work and you should be ready to 
work through and solve problems..."

I mean, maybe somewhere on the site it says something more explicit 
about the goals, but my point is that information like that is not front 
and centre. It's very easy for someone like myself to get the 
impression, as I did, that this would be a new OS in need of tweeks, but 
not that it expected me to be a hacker getting under the hood all the time.

I'm not upset that I got into Fedora and discovered that it's not what I 
was looking for.  I'm just wondering about the alternatives when it 
comes to Open Source Linux distros. The thing about Centos is that it's 
got this really squiky way of saying how it's based on code from "a 
prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor", which I assume is Red 
Hat, but if they can't even name them, then how close is this 
assocation? I'm sorry, Centos people, but it seems dodgy.

In any case, last night I made a fresh clean-and-install of Fedora 4, 
just to see if I can walk a little more slowly this time and dodge some 
settings problems. I'm willing to give Fedora another shot. But if it 
drives me nuts, are there other Open Source Linux distros beyond Centos?

Dave