[colug-432] CentOS

[Rick Troth]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck at spamcop.net> wrote:
> I thought I would ask if anyone has any opinions about CentOS desktop.   ...

I started a reply, but then discarded it when I saw good responses
coming in.  Was gonna say something about desktop depending more on
GNome -vs- KDE than on the distro.  And you probably know most of
this.

Aaron mentioned using 'yum' and Brian's on OpenSuSE which has
'zypper'.  (You did not say which desktop, KDE or GNome.)  I have not
gotten my head wrapped around 'apt-get'.  (See my last paragraph about
pain from Ubuntu, which is Debian derived.)

What Matt said about EPEL helping CentOS fits my purist attitude:
Linux is Linux.  Lately I'm on Fedora, but that may change next go
round.  (I'll either ditch GNome in favor of XFCE or I'll ditch
abandon Fedora outright.  The GNome 3 debacle Neal mentions.)  Most
recent prior for me was SuSE.  In my SuSE days, I learned to install
SLES as if leap-frogging SLED.  All "desktop" apps were available for
the "server" base, so what was the point of differentiating?  Notice
that in 11 they drop that qualifier and just called it "SLE".  Cute.

But ... about CentOS ... my old friend (best man at my wedding) hit me
up for virtualization help.  He's using CentOS and the machine is for
desktop use.  (But he is mixing Windoze in there, and I don't know if
the Linux guests will be CentOS or something else.)  And I didn't even
sell him on it; he chose CentOS all by himself.  So if you think of
CentOS as a server system, then just add desktop (to the tune of "just
add water").

Am not happy with Canonical.  About playing down the Linux name, I
might do the same thing.  (The purist goes extreme:  Linux is POSIX,
so the actual op sys might be *BSD.  So I'm kind of okay with that
part.)  But Canonical have muddied the waters with the hand-holding
stuff.  (I'm no Apple fan, but Apple does a better job of hand-holding
on a *NIX base, and they don't break Linux in the process.)  Rest
assured, RH wants to widen their market share just as much, but what
Canonical does is consumerist.  I managed to get my daughter off of
Vista using Kubuntu.  Later got burned on upgrades (not as bad as
happened to Angelo).  So she and my wife are now on F14 with GNome.

-- R;   <><