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

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

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.)'

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