I have been using as a professional engineer Centos 7 on my dual Xeon workstation desktop and as a server since first release of C7. Am conservative and need stability. It's been the best decision ever since leaving windows. Don't miss it a bit though corporates have a blinkered attitude to:
1/ Linux re desktop apps,
2/ Centos is only for servers (rubbish!)
3/ as mentioned active discrimination (for business reasons?) against linux
4/ ooh its open source can't be any good then.
and as a result no one wants to write commercial apps equivalent to Win10 apps and support can be poor from 3rd parties. It's a chicken and egg situation. No one wants to invest in commercial desktop apps for linux due to perceived lack of demand. But demand is poor because there's few apps. But it is changing - slowly, once cost and usage advantages become apparent.
Centos Workstation has been rock stable for me. However in the first year of Centos 7 there weren't many non-server apps in the repos. That has now changed. However it's also not that difficult to create you own yum repository packages as long as your disciplined. Just grap those from Fedora 22-24 repos, adjust specs and compile and place into you own yum repo. Bingo it works provided the dependency version of Centos match or you have to go down the dependency domino tree which then does get painful but doable.
I have to admit I hate Gnome. Use KDE and it's been great. Only one hick up - when some moron modified gtk3+ without coordinating with KDE package requirements resulting in some issues last year. But latest repo releases have fixed that.
My only current issue is interacting in dual boot with windows 10 where I'd like access to the Windows 10 managed raid 0 partition on my son's digital content creation workstation used for cinemagraphic work. Unfortunately no professional editors exist for Linux, that's why dual boot for Win10 apps. Although there is a tool to help, libldm (ldmtool), unfortunately the centos kernel does not enable CONFIG_LDM_PARTITION option. That's surprising for a "server" OS in today's multi-OS environments but also representative of conservative RHEL/Centos for stability which i would have thought any boss would appreciate.
Eventually we will move to virtualised Win10 (for editors) once kernel incorporates mdv for mediated PCIe pass-through for graphics cards to enable OpenGL and CUDA support using Nvidia drivers. Current version of ovirt has this and I will investigate and trial this soon.
Note also in the movie industry where supercomputing style performance is paramount to render visual effects, cad-animation etc much of the industry is moving to linux. An example, final digital masters (DCM) for distribution have been standardised by their standards body to ext4 formats -see DCM (Digital Content Master?)
Those contemplating Centos-7 for Workstation particularly for Digitial Content Creation where I am helping my son a film maker, Centos renders Visual Effects, ray-trace or other rendering 30% faster then for the same software package in Windows (eg Blender / Nuke and other professional enterprise package in the movie industry). So check out the big corporates of the movie industry. There's action there.
Also CERN using ScientificLinux a derivative of Centos uses it in their workplace. Governments around the world have also been looking at linux for the workplace.
For high performance computing workstation workloads Win 10 can't touch a Centos workstation in terms of speed and performance, stability or security. SELinux in my view is a big selling point.
So for standard enterprise desktop, Centos 7 is easy and no brainer. Give it a try. In many ways equivalent to expensive Macbooks but you have a stable OS for 10 years. Calculate the cost savings. They can be substantial provided you have linux apps as suitable equivalents for the enterprise workflow. If not, then you're stuck with Win 7/8/10.
In our case Win10 and Centos are still cost effective because of the 30% performance advantage of Linux when rendering when compared to Win10 for same commercial package - see Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, Blender (being adopted by professionals now), Nuke and many others. In our case a 1.5 hour animated movie on a dual Xeon E5-2687W takes 67,500 hours to render under Linux. Under Windows it would take another 20250 hours to render. Now you wouldn't do this if you work out number of days for a single workstation. You'd use data-centre or Amazon EC2 to reduce this but it shows the performance difference for HPC workloads that a Centos workstation provides versus the same hardware under Windows.
I have used openSuse and Fedora. The issues there is the bleeding edge issue (a la bugs / instability etc) and constant software updates that can be hard to keep up with particularly when things break. That's why I do not recommend these for desktop in the enterprise. I do not know about Ubuntu or Linux Mint but I imagine its the same issue their if their using the latest apps and kernel.
Now Macs are better for the enterprise due to Apple support and apps but you pay for it and then there is no cost advantage in switching over from Windows. In fact it probably would cost to switch.
If you want to convince the boss do the numbers. Money talks. Check all the apps needed in the enterprise. Are there equivalents in repos? Calculate license fee saving per seat but add training cost for Centos and different apps. If its cost effective, give the numbers to the boss - then talk turkey! Until then your wasting time.
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