4 ms·
I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usu
by cozzyd 10y ago
I recommend Fedora, it has more up-to-date stuff and very developer friendly. I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants, so Fedora is naturally a good platform for it. I've always had more trouble compiling random things on debian-based stuff though (probably has something to do with default linker flags and poorly-written packages).
RH has a big virtualization focus, and Fedora is their development playgroond, so if you're planning on using KVM for virtualization, it's very easy to get going.
However, if you use VMWare, sometimes VMware won't support the newest kernels immediately which can cause problems since Fedora upgrades quite frequently.
Others have mentioned trouble updating with Fedora, but I upgraded from F16-F24 on my desktop fine. I finally decided to do a clean install to F25 on my desktop just to switch to a UEFI boot. F24->F25 worked perfectly fine on my laptop (and the upgrade experience has gotten better and better). Either way, as long as you put /home (and, maybe /opt, /usr/local and /var) on their own partitions, doing a clean install is no big deal.
It seems many people had bad experiences with yum/rpm in the past, but dnf is much faster and I think people usually run into problems when mixing non-compatible repositories.
- jcoffland 10y ago> I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants This is due to university lock in. RedHat convinced a lot of institutions that they were better off paying for Linux. I think a lot of the establishment couldn't use free software because they had no procedure in place for doing so. Often buying a RedHat support agreement was the most palatable or even only way to get on the Linux bandwagon. Around the time RedHat stopped supporting desktop RedHat and spawned Fedora they turned their focus towards selling contracts and creating so called enterprise features such as remote management which appealed to institutional IT teams, to the detriment of the desktop user. RedHat has made a lot of money this way but they lost their position as the dominant Linux distro because the hackers whom RedHat originally catered to moved on to distros which paid then more attention.
- evilDagmar 10y agoLet me put this to you in another light... Would you rather simply update the definitions on your satellite server and then check the status of your upgrades the next day, or would you like to upgrade 1500 assorted servers and VMs manually?
- hackuser 10y agoIf the user just wants to get work done and doesn't care if they have the latest thing, why not CentOS?
- justincormack 10y agoIf you want recent kernels, a non LTS distro has advantages. The kernel is the main thing that matters if you mainly use containers for development.
- tornadoboy55 10y agoCentOS is meant to be a server OS and misses a lot of the niceties that Desktop Linux variants have.
- hackuser 10y agoThanks. What kinds of niceties? I spent awhile looking at it and the other RH distros, and didn't come across anything saying CentOS was a server OS (not that I doubt you, I just would be interested in more details if you happen to know them).
- tornadoboy55 10y agoPackages are often kept at stable (but old) versions for a very long time. This is good for servers, but bad for users. Same goes for the kernel - again, good for servers, but not so much for new-ish hardware. In general its a very conservative distro. As far as it being a server OS, well.. 'In July 2010, CentOS overtook Debian to become the most popular Linux distribution for web servers, with almost 30% of all Linux web servers using it.[15] (Debian retook the lead in January 2012.)'
- cozzyd 10y agoI use CentOS on my workstation at work, but I wouldn't recommend it for a laptop with new hardware.
- wineisfine 10y ago