Hello everyone,
I'm Xavier. New to CentOS, currently coming out of a 11 year stint with Gentoo/Funtoo, 1 week with openSUSE, and now, after install and set up, hopefully a long time with CentOS.
I loved Gentoo, Moved to funtoo because I felt i was a bit more efficient, less of a hassle to install. The community was tight knit at funtoo, smaller than Gentoo, and I have to say, they all worked their asses off to find solutions to any problem. I learned a lot on a troubleshooting level.
Unfortunatley, as of the past year, there have been some issues that I tried to work around. Some were Linux-wide, others Gentoo specific, to the point where I rolled back to Funtoo stable in order to avoid the bugs/issues during compile and install of packages. But even stable had some issues I considered unacceptable for a stable OS. Mainly, some packages that were critical were not compiling well or playing nice. Also, every other system sync, I'd find a package that was broken or not working.
As mentioned, it was a smaller community than Gentoo, and they had a lot of work in front of them.
I then started to question the whole source distro philosophy, and if it was for me. There were moments when I was spending more time with distro specific problems, rather than getting work done. I came to the conclusion that I had learned A LOT but it was time to move on.
I wanted to move on to something that could be used on a server both in enterprise as well as for my personal use, AND also as a desktop. I'd like to possibly leverage knowing linux and translating that to some kind of industry certificate. I know a little bit about linux through my time with Gentoo/Funtoo, BUT... at this stage in my career, it would be nice to have some kind of certificate showing my penguin chops.
So I "shopped", compared, read, then copied some distro images that I had narrowed down to. openSUSE and CentOS.
I considered Debian, and I even installed it for an hour, but I didn't like the feel. I think it was using a dated Gnome version, and it was kind of tough to install. Deleting a partition to repurpose it for Debian was giving me a hard time during the guided installation, apparently kept on getting errors. Really wierd. I wasn't too convinced either since there weren't any certificates relevant to my current professional aspirations, so I dropped it almost immediately.
So then, I leaned towards openSUSE, mainly because the daily desktop/work portion was mostly ready right out of the box and seemed to be easier to set up.
This past week, I spent some time playing with openSUSE. I liked YaST, although I prefer using terminal for doing things, I liked that at least while I get acquainted with the OS, I had a GUI (training wheels). I also noticed that it was very flexible for whatever need I wanted it to be, whether it be desktop or server.
But alas, installing critical packages that resided in different repos was a problem. Documentation wasn't clear, installing a package meant possibly pulling from 2 other different repos that I hadn't even heard of. Although I got everything to work, I feared dependency hell further down the road. Not knowing which package comes from where, or why it came from there... and in turn if I had to roll back not knowing which packages to uninstall in what order, and which repos to uninstall in what order.... that didn't sit well in my stomach.
On openSUSE I probably had 10 different 3rd party repos after installing skype, monitoring-plugins (nagios-plugins) , and steam, and I had no clue as to the relationship between the 3rd party repos, and the official ones.
I initially had some reserve about this OS because I had heard it was an awesome, stable, server OS, that was derived from RHEL but mainly focused on servers. That it would take a bit of magic to get it to be a decent desktop system. That openSUSE was better in the sense that it was more flexible (desktop/server) and had a decent server footprint in the business world as well.
So I gave CentOS a spin, and I'm liking it so far. I was able to set up my laptop and my desktop quickly and relatively hiccup free, package repos are MUCH better explained here. I think I have 3 repos that I've had to add between skype, steam, and a newer kernel (for logitech wireless mouse support which was my only hiccup out of box). Those 3 repos, I read in the description that they don't overlap the official repos, which is SUPER important to know and would let me sleep at night.
So, I'm looking forward to continuing being on here. As I mentioned, I'd like to get out of CentOS some enterprise linux experience, get a super stable OS for my day to day desktop, install them on a demo network, and hopefully get involved in some way in the CentOS community once I get to know the OS a little bit better. It's all linux underneath!