What do you guys think about CentOS? How it differs from other distros?

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If you want RHeL but don't want to pay for it, CentOS is your distro. It's just RHeL without official support or copyrighted logos.

@-Minty- This.

It's great if you like Red Hat. (I don't)

@Root What do you prefer for daily use then?

@shalinbhatt Debian. Mint is also nice if you want something more friendly.

@Root Cool! Thanks. I use CentOS as well as ubuntu sometimes. Just trying to get opinions from others.

@shalinbhatt Gentoo. 🙂

@Root Hmm! Never Tried it. Maybe I will check it out!!

Prod

@itsundef ?

It's redhat linux for community. Think of it as a distro designed for heavy lifting and high reliability, i.e. designed for servers. You can use it for your own desktop needs, but it's very likely you will not find many things you could get for debian-based distros. Well at least not as easy to get them working on cent/rhel :)

@netikras Got it! Thanks. I have always used debian based systems. but CentOS has it's uses like you said.

@iamavalos ROFL!! Yes it does! It's summer now maybe I should change to shorts, too!!

I use centos for servers only. It's great once you understand how selinux works and wants to not work.

# Setenforce 0 is not a option you should ever consider.

Other then that as others have said it's a RHEL OS without the official support. But then who needs that these days. If you break it spin up another.

@C0D4 True!! SELinux works great! Very useful

Another point, CentOS is rock solid and crashes extremely rarely, but as a downside, you don't exactly get the latest versions of packages. So if you need Linux for a setup where you want to configure it once and then leave it to work reliably for like forever, like professional Blender/GIMP/Krita/Maya etc. work, then I would totally recommend it, been using it with Blender and Maya and it's been super stable.

@C0D4 rh support often helps to do post-mortem crash RCAs. More often than not some hardware faults might not be reported by hw monitoring tools and some non-OOTB configurations might not work very well.

Prolly most of the cases I had to raise ended up in SB replacements or veritas san/ha related issues that were not possible to see in any other way.

Ofc this is hardly ever useful on virtual envs. But even there might be cases rh could help

Solid but packages are often not up-to-date. Also, RPMs are not ideal. Debian is good too.