On 1/19/2011 9:13 AM, John Hodrien wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:
>
>> CentOS would likely only be used as a desktop OS by people who also run
>> servers and like everything to be the same. They all assemble approximately
>> the same set of upstream packages, though, so it is possible to make them
>> all do the same things with varying amounts of work in finding current
>> packages that might be missing in the base distribution.
>
> I do think CentOS gets unreasonably knocked as a desktop OS. I definitely
> don't use it on desktops *because* I run it on servers.
>
The difference is that open source server software has been 'feature
complete' for ages and the standards processes that change client/server
interactions are very, very slow - so outdated versions of server
software is not a problem as long as bug/security fixes are made.
That's not true for desktop applications and environments. If you don't
have something current you are missing the improvements that many
thousands of man-hours of work have made. Personally, I use Windows at
work and a Mac at home as desktops and use their applications for
'typical' desktop work so I avoid the issue completely (along with the
ubiquitous Nvidia driver problems and lack of media codecs) and run
NX/freenx to access CentOS hosts for development and server management.
This gives me a full Centos desktop with good performance when/where I
want it, with the ability to disconnect and reconnect with everything
running, but without being limited to old, free software versions. If I
didn't have the commercial apps available, I'd almost certainly need to
run some current distribution for desktop use.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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