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CentOS Linux

CentOS Linux

Overview

What is CentOS Linux?

CentOS Linux is a Linux distribution is an enterprise OS platform compatible with its source RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its end of life was announced for December 2021.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

CentOS Linux is widely used in various industries and for a multitude of purposes. Organizations rely on CentOS as a stable and reliable …
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Server material

8 out of 10
May 12, 2021
Incentivized
We use CentOS as the host OS for MongoDB servers in our analytics service. We also used to have it as the host for the user file Backup …
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CentOS rocks!

10 out of 10
July 06, 2019
Incentivized
CentOS is our go-to. For any software that can run on Linux, we choose it. We don't have to mess with Microsoft licensing and Windows …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Product Demos

DELL OMSA CentOS 6.4 DEMO 2014

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demo of free open source CentOS Linux, R, and RStudio for quant

YouTube

CentOS Linux Hot Plug CPU and Hot Plug Memory Demo

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VMware Tutorial Beginners | Session 14 CentOS Linux Hot Plug CPU and Hot Plug Memory Demo

YouTube

Learning Centos Linux : LVM Management on CentOS XenServer Demo Linux VM

YouTube
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Product Details

What is CentOS Linux?

CentOS Linux is a Linux distribution is an enterprise OS platform compatible with its source RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its end of life was announced for December 2021.

CentOS Linux Technical Details

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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(130)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

CentOS Linux is widely used in various industries and for a multitude of purposes. Organizations rely on CentOS as a stable and reliable operating system for hosting a wide range of services. It serves as the foundation for information cyber security virtual appliances, making it a popular choice among vendors in this field. Additionally, CentOS is well-suited for network services like web servers and network file sharing, providing a solid platform for organizations to deliver their online presence.

Academic institutions also find great value in CentOS, using it as the primary Linux distribution for instructional and research computing endeavors. It offers a stable research platform that is easy to manage and comes with a solid support path. Moreover, CentOS is preferred by developers for custom software development and deployment, as it provides a stable and secure environment while offering regular security updates.

For organizations looking for cost-effective solutions, CentOS is an excellent choice. It eliminates the need for costly licenses associated with other Linux distributions like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Many companies use CentOS for hosting public-facing websites, infrastructure monitoring, DNS services, phone systems, and various other server roles. Its compatibility with RPM packages makes it cloud-friendly and allows mirroring of expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

Overall, users appreciate the speed, stability, and ease of use that CentOS offers. It serves as the go-to choice for virtual machines throughout many organizations and is known for its reliability. Additionally, CentOS eliminates the need for Microsoft licensing and Windows updates, making it a hassle-free option for those seeking an alternative to Windows-based systems.

High Security and Stability: Many users have expressed their satisfaction with the high level of security and stability provided by CentOS. They value the peace of mind that comes from using a reliable operating system straight out of the box.

Smooth Performance: Users consistently praise the performance of CentOS, even on average hardware. They appreciate its efficiency and optimization, which result in a smooth and responsive user experience.

Versatile Deployment: The ease and speed of deployment in various scenarios make CentOS a versatile choice for different projects. Users find it convenient for their needs, allowing them to quickly set up their development environment or host necessary network services.

Network Configuration Issues: Some users have experienced difficulties configuring network interfaces in CentOS, particularly when using it outside of regular configuration. This has been a common frustration among reviewers.

Slow Server Updates: Reviewers have expressed a desire for faster server updates in CentOS. They feel that the current update process takes too long and they would like to see improvements in this area.

Limited User-Friendly Features: CentOS is not considered a good desktop solution by some users due to its lack of certain user-friendly features and an intuitive user interface. These limitations have been mentioned by multiple reviewers as drawbacks of the software.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-6 of 6)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use CentOS Linux in almost every capacity except as an end user facing system. I use it as a mail server, web server, router, vpn endpoint, development system, high availability clustering node, virtual machine hypervisor, wireless access point, encryption appliance, and virtually every other kind of system, other than laptop or desktop. It excels at all of the server type roles that it is placed in.
  • CentOS Linux works extremely well as a development system. Development packages are readily available and 3rd party compatibility is very high.
  • CentOS Linux works extremely well for high availability clustering. It has native packages for DRBD which make it easy to provision high availability.
  • CentOS Linux has very little extra "nonsense" running, it can be slimmed down to a bare minimum system very easily to allow for maximum compute power to be devoted to the application.
  • It is extremely stable, however it could use a more robust "experimental" branch where new/different/updated code could be applied
  • It lacks end-user niceties. As a laptop/desktop system, it's absolutely awful. It would be very nice if there were better developed frontends for it
In any role where you need raw server power, CentOS Linux is extremely well suited. It is extremely stable, and in my experience, probably the most stable of the Linux distros available. It has a very wide base of support from 3rd party sources for additional functionality that do not come already in the CentOS Linux distribution itself. It is not as appropriate for situations that are customer facing or end user facing. For those, I recommend Ubuntu Linux. But for everything server & compute related, I recommend CentOS Linux.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CentOS has been my Linux flavour of choice for many years. I use it both personally and professionally for multiple purposes. We have CentOS running for our corporate firewall filtering, network file storage, web application development and MySQL hosting. We primarily use the operating system on headless machines, accessed over SSH. We utilize the command line interface, not the GUI options.
  • Extremely Stability
  • Widely Used - Lots of reference material available
  • Runs fast, even on older hardware
  • FREE!
  • Moderate learning curve, not ideal for a Linux novice
  • Support for newest software updates may require installing unofficial distros
  • Support life cycle recently changed, pushing users away from traditional CentOS
I have been a CentOS user for over 10 years and remain loyal to the core OS. When it comes to stability and speed, there's no other OS I'd recommend over it. I base this recommendation on my personal experience, as I have multiple development and production servers running the CentOS software today. It's running on newer and older hardware with ease, and the price is right!
July 17, 2019

Why I love CentOS

Joseph Ngugi Muiruri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Most of our development team works with opensource tools and contribute towards the improvement of CentOS and other Linux based tools and our default Operating system is CentOS. Our system administrators and Linux engineers mostly operate with CentOS.
  • It is highly customizable.
  • Very secure.
  • Very stable distribution with a wide user community.
  • It is a little complex because few c/c++ libraries will give dependencies issues.
  • Installing/uninstalling packages in RHEL is a little bit of a headache.
  • Not being able to run certain things on CentOS because everything is so out of date.
  • CentOS is great for businesses and developers that don't need the newest releases. CentOS is more stable and secure because of that - it always uses stable (but older) versions of their software.
  • When developing/publishing PHP based projects, we always prefer to use CentOS. We always use unmanaged services so there is no problem of sticking to older versions of PHP. We use PHP 7.1 / Laravel 5.4 without any problems on CentOS.

    On the other hand, when we are working with Ruby-based projects- we do face dependency issues with c/c++ libraries while installing certain newer gems on CentOS.

Charles R. Coggins III | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CentOS is currently being used as the primary OS for our Zabbix Server and our Web Server that hosts a couple of our websites. CentOS is a very stable build of Linux based off of Red Hat but it is free so you get a lot of the power and features of Red Hat Enterprise but you do not need to pay for any licenses. We are using it because we wanted to run our web server on a very minimalistic and quick operating system that we knew would we not really run into any issues with. I can say for as long as I have been dealing with the server side of things I have never had any problems with our web server or our Zabbix server.
  • CentOS is very secure and stable. It is on par with RHEL and receives a lot of the same corporate level security updates making it a great choice for all users.
  • Another strength of CentOS would be its longer release cycle and longer support cycle. RHEL packages have been through a lot of testing before going to the repositories. This helps makes sure that all bugs are found and "hopefully" fixed prior to being released. Both RHEL and CentOS releases are usually supported for about 10 years.
  • Then I think really the other thing is just speed as I mentioned above. CentOS runs very basic software and will run much faster than other similar Linux distributions.
  • I also really like CentOS Web Panel for our web server. I don't know if that was built in or if it was something we added on, but it is a free application that allows us to manage our hosted sites very easily and see how everything is doing. We can just open up a web browser and browse out to CWP and see all the stats of our websites.
  • The hugest drawback, but also the best feature of CentOS is the lack of updates. It is awesome because you know what you have installed on your server is going to just work, but it works because the release is usually older and has been tested to work. With that being said you don't get the latest and possibly greatest versions of the software. So you could be missing out on some great new features.
  • Nothing else really I feel is a con. It is a really good Linux server option.
CentOS is a beast of a Linux Server. If you need something that is minimalistic, fast and you know you can just drop whatever you want on and just let it continue to run, CentOS is the way to go. I would not use this if you are the type of person or company who always wants to have the latest and greatest features. You would probably have better luck with another Distro like Ubuntu.
Aaron Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CentOS is used by our organization to host many services organization wide services. We have various public facing web sites that utilize PHP, MariaDB, and DotNet Core that are hosted on CentOS servers. We also utilize a few CentOS servers to host applications such as UniFi's controller software, Zabbix for infrastructure monitoring and problem alerting, as well as DNS services. We also run FreePBX for our entire organization wide phone system, which is also based on CentOS.

CentOS gives us a secure and very reliable OS to host these services on commodity hardware for a very little financial impact.
  • Quick and easy installation process with sensible and secure defaults.
  • Its very stable and reliable.
  • Very easy to install 3rd party software via upstream repositories.
  • SELinux that helps to harden CentOS can sometimes get in the way of 3rd party software and working around it can be a trying process.
CentOS is very well suited for server infrastructure, especially if it's a public facing service. However, if it is being evaluated for a desktop experience, there are better options.
Kenneth Hess | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CentOS is a RedHat clone that is widely accepted as the "Go To" Red Hat Linux clone for mimicking a production Red Hat environment. I use it for virtual machines for various services such as web server. CentOS is used as a standard OS. CentOS solves a major business problem which is enterprise service delivery. It delivers robust services on a free platform. CentOS is well-supported with regular security and operating system updates. It is well-suited for all network services, including as a network file share. It shares all the features of Red Hat including that of a virtual host. I use it as an OpenVZ hosting platform but it's quite capable as a KVM host as well.
  • CentOS provides businesses with a very complete development platform for all open source software languages and some proprietary ones. Entire development environments are available with a few commands or clicks in the GUI.
  • CentOS is a powerful and free web host platform. Using Apache, Nginx, or other web servers, CentOS can be part of a standalone web solution or as part of a large farm of load balanced systems.
  • CentOS provides a free platform for hosting all necessary network services such as DNS, file sharing, printer sharing, DHCP, and more. It also works extremely well as a virtual machine, to further that no cost platform into a farm of systems.
  • CentOS is not a great desktop platform. Although some would disagree with that statement, I think that CentOS is better suited to life as a server.
  • Since CentOS is community-supported some software vendors will not officially support it because it isn't Red Hat.
I would use CentOS in any scenario where cost is a concern or where speed and reliability are very important. CentOS is very well suited to Internet-type services, such as network services and N-tier hosting scenarios. It is an excellent database server because of its speed and tunability. Anything that you would use Red Hat Linux for, you can do with CentOS. I would not recommend CentOS as a desktop operating system. There are better distributions for that application.
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