Hacker News Reader

Comment by Longhanks | Hacker News Reader

What? The software in CentOS' official repositories is horribly outdated (aka 'stable', which is why it runs on many servers). Why should a desktop system run CentOS? I'd rather recommend Ubuntu or one of its descendants. They also have LTS versions, if stability is a concern, but are not as outdated as CentOS.

View on HN

Fedora is too cutting edge and CentOS is too outdated? Ok then, go off to Canonical land where everything falls apart outside the most common use cases and your entire desktop experience changes every couple of years.

Fedora isn't cutting edge compared to actual rolling release distros so if that's still too much for you then RHEL or CentOS should be enough.

Debian works just fine, IME - better than Ubuntu LTS provided that the hardware support is OK. Even OpenSuse is a nice middle ground.

Debian was nothing but trouble for me. I found myself in opposition to too many of their design choices and some packages to be too outdated. At the end of the day it lacks the polish and moddability I've come to expect from Fedora.

I'm at NASA Goddard and we use RHEL/CentOS for servers and a few desktops and Ubuntu on some desktops. I am sometimes frustrated by the age of certain CentOS packages, but having compatibility with our servers is a plus. I've avoided Fedora due to the rapid release cycle and the lack of official support by NASA (at least here at Goddard). There's no perfect solution.

I've put certain family members on CentOS.

It kinda depends upon what you're doing with your computer. E.g. if I weren't into gaming I would be using CentOS over Fedora (or Ubuntu).

Why don't you use SCL if the official repos are outdated?

CentOS 8 is not fresh enough for you?

Does it exist yet?

No. But at least RHEL 8 (based on Fedora 28) has been available as a beta release for a while now (since 25th November 2018), so it shouldn't be too long.. I'd speculate another 4-6 months and we'll have it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com