I use CentOS over Fedora because it's very stable and has a great support. Most distros that I've used crushed on me, fairly frequently compared to CentOS. CentOS and RHEL just seems very polished to me. I do run it as desktop on one of my machines but it's more of a server distro. I like Gnome2 too and I can't stand Fedora's Gnome3, it just gets in the way. One major draw back is software updates, they are a bit behind. But for the server I think its excellent. I'd compare Ubuntu to Fedora and CentOS/RHEL to Debian. Come to think of it, you can have extra repos on CentOS, like rpmforge and rpmfusion for newer software. I personally like CentOS.