Comments on: CentOS 5 as a Desktop System

By: George Van Tuyl

George Van Tuyl — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 14:25:34 +0000

This Review is helpful. Unlike a few of the hostile comments (Christi, Fritz, Dave and Michael) of this review. Which fail to explain of justify their position as to why this review is a poor one. Open Source is about making comments, Software and education in Open Source software better. The point is if you are going to make a statement that you feel that this is a poor review. Then you should explain your position in a way that the author and we the audience could learn from. Else you just are another Windows user that knows nothing about Open Source and only wishes to trash the movement.

By: Fritz

Fritz — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:52:37 +0000

This coment deserves no real reply other than the arrogance shown/expressed indicates who has little computer “experience”.

By: jj

jj — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:16:40 +0000

imac therefore i am
is just another pop mode victim
lets stay humans before marketing’ll strip us out of skin

By: Will

Will — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:58:51 +0000

Thanks for the review, good info.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:01:55 +0000

Good article, thanks.

By: guest

guest — Mon, 25 May 2009 08:51:33 +0000

@RHEL is based on Fedora@
polish butterfly is a strong thing, do not abuse!
wtf man?

By: RJB

RJB — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:09:32 +0000

I don’t appreciate those who have been knocking the review. As all can see it has actually been helpful to some people.

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.

By: Anonymouse

Anonymouse — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:29:11 +0000

Yes – this release is heavier than RHEL4.

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.