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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

If the user just wants to get work done and doesn't care if they have the latest thing, why not CentOS?

I wonder this too, because on our servers, which are running WHM/Cpanel, they're all running on CentOS and it seems to work very well. I'm on macOS privately.

But yeah, for some reason, on our servers, it seems to work solid, but here it's not very liked as dev distro.

If 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.

CentOS is meant to be a server OS and misses a lot of the niceties that Desktop Linux variants have.

Thanks. 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).

Packages 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.)'

I use CentOS on my workstation at work, but I wouldn't recommend it for a laptop with new hardware.

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