Cheap RPM support, not much else
October 31, 2019
Cheap RPM support, not much else
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CentOS
As our organization looked to shift to cloud development, we need to standardize on a cloud-friendly Linux distribution. We evaluated CentOS for this purpose within my development team with the idea being that CentOS offered compatibility with rpm packages, and could largely mirror an expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) server, without the cost. Unfortunately, we found that CentOS 8 was not fit for this purpose.
- Barebones user-interface - CentOS doesn't aim to be flashy, and takes a no-nonsense approach to the user interface. Unfortunately, this is also one of its downsides.
- RPM package compatibility - CentOS can readily use most RPMs making it trivially easy to set up a machine for development that you'll want to mirror for production.
- Command Line Customization - CentOS is easier than other distributions for customizing from the command line, making it easier to automate the deployment of a new instance.
- Ugly User Interface - I can deal with a simple and barebones interface, but that doesn't mean it needs to look like it was designed in the early 90s.
- Smaller user base than other distributions - CentOS, while well established as a viable Linux distribution, lacks as strong of a user base as other distributions, making it more difficult to get support on user forums.
- Drive compatibility - CentOS lacks as robust driver support as other distributions. For instance, in my most recent install, I still needed to install networking support packages, rather than having in-built support.
- CentOS's support of RPM packages makes it very easy to replicate RHEL servers for development or testing in cheap / free environments
- CentOS's minimalistic desktop environment requires additional tweaking / packages if you want to have a usable desktop environment with the niceties of other modern distributions. As a result, if developers want to use CentOS, they'll need to spend more time customizing it than other distros.
- CentOS's easy customization from the command line lends itself well to our virtualization infrastructure where setup can be easily scripted to modify CentOS's configuration files.
For our development environment, we evaluated CentOS against Ubuntu and SLES, and actually did not end up picking CentOS, as our developers found it primitive compared to the niceties offered out of the box from Ubuntu. In addition, our developers found that Ubuntu had an extensive user community, meaning they could very easily find support if needed from user forums. At that point, CentOS was a non-starter and we didn't move forward.
Do you think CentOS Linux delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with CentOS Linux's feature set?
No
Did CentOS Linux live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of CentOS Linux go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy CentOS Linux again?
No