CentOS for newbie's desktop? [Was: Re: Fedora Core ... problem]

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue May 29 21:54:31 UTC 2007


Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2007-05-29, 18:55 GMT, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> [...], but I wish there were something that used the same 
>> packaging and admin techniques that would make a usable desktop 
> 
> On that note. Couple of people asked me (or are going to ask me 
> soon) to install Linux on their desktop. People who are computer 
> savvy to some degree (or not that much savvy in one case -- but 
> the lady has learned Red Hat first in times when it was still Red 
> Hat, and then she got Windows with the new computer, and now she 
> goes around and notalgically remembers about beautfy of that Red 
> Hat icons which was welcoming her on login, and hates 
> unfriendliness of Windows ;-) -- and she is really not computer 
> geek; sorry, I digress).
> 
> Being now a Red Hat employee, I would love to install them some 
> Red Hat related distro, but I am not sure which one. Of course, 
> they wouldn't like to shell out big bucks (especially considering 
> CZK-USD exhange rate) on RH Desktop. However, I wouldn't feel 
> happy to install them Fedora with 13 (or how many) months of 
> guaranteed support. So, I was thinking lately about installing 
> them CentOS as a desktop.
> 
> Is it good idea? Does anybody have any experience with using 
> CentOS on desktop, which is primarily used to do something else 
> than developing Linux? Any other ideas?

Today, Centos5 would be a very reasonable desktop choice since it was 
just released and is almost exactly that end-of-life FC6 but with 
continued updates that I said earlier that I wanted.   But, a year and a 
half from now - or whenever faster-moving distros have shipped a newer 
Evolution, Firefox, OO, etc., it may start to look old and stale because 
the apps don't get new-feature updates within the release lifetime. 
The nature of the fedora/RHEL split is that if you want new app features 
you have to accept the experimental kernels and device drivers that come 
bundled with them in fedora.  There is also some odd issue with Sun java 
vs. the packaged java items in the Centos5 base repository that might or 
might not be a problem for you.  I think this is inherited from RHEL5 
and has something to do with rebuilding jars during package installs.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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