My company has been using CentOS 5 on our server for about a year and it really shines there. The CentOS server doesn’t need any babysitting. It just sits in the basement and does its thing day after day, month after month and from what I have heard…probably year after year until we experience some kind of crippling hardware failure.

As a desktop I find it slow and burdensome for the workstation we have set up to run the color scanner. I have installed Debian testing on many older low-resource computers and have had better performance. I realize it’s all about configuration since I am able to make a Debian system as sluggish as can be by enabling desktop gadgets and frilly services. For example, I am working from a Debian workstation that uses 450MB RAM due to all the gadgets and eye-candy I have enabled. I have a fast enough computer to handle it, but if this was an older machine I simply wouldn’t be running frilly applications. Similarly, CentOS base install can be stripped down to a more customized configuration that meets the limited requirements of an older PC.

Based on my experience thus far I would not discourage anybody from using CentOS as a desktop unless they really want non-free support out of the box (flash & other multimedia applications of the sort).

As an aside, I really had a broken RHEL5 system when I was using it as a desktop. It broke by adding non-supported repositories. I expect CentOS would break just as easily. If it doesn’t come distributed with CentOS and you want it, I would recommend using a different distro that has whatever it is in their repositories. It seems Debian-based distros have the same propensity to break with unsupported repos, but in my experience has been more forgiving in general.

I hope this is helpful to somebody who is in the process of deciding what distribution to use.

I am very used to the feel of RHEL4 and can definitely tell the difference. Nautilus is hogging 10% of the CPU.

With 1GB RAM and doing a copy/transfer from a USB drive and nothing but defaults (no “servers”) I have 6216k free memory. 96k of swap is used.

As a server person I wonder why Linux aims for the Desktop so much. No one who pays wants it for that, they don’t care. They want solid, lean mean servers.

Want a great Desktop and Unix? Get a mac. Really. Want a great server… well, I hope I can keep using Linux for that but the are about to lose that ground too it seems.

I think it depends on what you use it for. I installed CentOS 5.2 recently on one of my systems at home to become more familiar with it for script development of custom sites. I’m using it right now actually, because it’s actually easier for me to use than many other systems I’ve messed with. Though it is of note that it is a little bloated on first install. Took me a single day to configure the majority of the system, and after that, I’ve had very few problems. Primary problem was mentioned in this article, not coming with certain codecs. If you get the right repos though, you can solve that with a little yummy pain.

I’ve had few systems install easier. At least after you got the system installed you can look up any further problems on the web. Most other distros I’ve worked with gave me some pain or another during install.