How much more polished is CentOS than Fedora, in practice?

I'm about 8 hours into a new Fedora 32 workstation and I dunno if I can take much more of it. Wayland's super crashy (yes I'm on AMD, not Nvidia) as in the whole thing crashing, not just individual apps; some fairly fundamental official packages don't work out of the box (Docker—how do you screw that up so bad that it's simpler to get working on macOS?); and there's lots of general irritation (missing i686 libs for my off-hours gaming—how's there not just a metapackage to install those?)

Would CentOS save me? Or am I doomed to end up on spits Win10 and doing my real work in light, disposable Linux VMs?

Hey, I think you need to learn a little more about what the different distros to be able to pick which one is a good fit for you.

Centos follows Red Hat Enterprise Linux as closely as they possibly can.

Fedora is more of an unstable distro where new things are tried out that may get into RHEL when they stabilize.

I don't think either of them have a goal of working on a very broad range of modern workstations. If you know you specifically want Centos or Fedora to do your work, you should build a workstation (or select a laptop) that you know will work with that distro.

Anyway you should rarely be seriously considering both of these at the same time. Either you want stability and you choose between Centos, Debian, or maybe older Ubuntu LTS, or you want to be on the edge and you choose Fedora, or the latest Ubuntu, etc.

Also there are other options besides Fedora, Centos, and Windows. Maybe Ubuntu would be a better fit for you.

Haven't liked Ubuntu since like... one of the 8 or 9 releases. Whenever the Pulseaudio switch happened and the distro stopped "Just Working". They've just gotten weirder and farther from what I want since then (yes I know all major distros use PulseAudio now—that's besides the point).

I default to Debian on the server but I just want a good base to run modern software development desktop software on. IDEs, docker, browsers, the occasional VM or image editor. That sort of thing. It's a hell of a gaming machine so being able to do some of that's a big bonus—waste of all this power when off the clock if I can't fire up games on it.

I'm most comfortable in Arch or Gentoo or Void or something along those lines, but that comfort's just because I'd rather be making something simple work than fixing something complex that's broken—either way it's fundamentally a waste of time, neither productive nor fun, and I'd prefer to avoid it these days.

The Suse suggestion in this thread's interesting. Kinda forgot it existed—haven't used it since 2004 or something. Might try that.

I really just want a distro that gives me a non-broken desktop on fairly boring, non-exotic hardware. I haven't really felt like I got that out of Linux in 20 years of trying off an on (more on than off) but it's 2020, right? Some of these companies make money from what they do. One of them must actually work. Win10's one of only three Windows I've hated and Apple's back on the "3x" side of its "1.5x-3x" markup range it swings between so I just want... peace, really.

If you want that, then just pick linux friendly hardware, it's the only path that doesn't lead to misery.

Haha, I'm pretty sure I did. Wayland just seems to have invented new and wonderful ways for applications to crash the entire windowing system. As if Xorg weren't good enough at that already. Most of the rest of my problems are with the quality of software packaging. Sigh.

You can disable Wayland in Fedora. Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf.

Wayland is kind of buggy, period. If you are looking to do gaming, just give PopOS a look. It's pretty well setup for gaming out of the box.

> Docker—how do you screw that up so bad that it's simpler to get working on macOS

You need to add "systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX and then install moby-engine. Something about upstream docker not supporting the newer cgroups in more recent linux kernels.

I had to fix three different things. When using the official package. Cgroups were broken (as you note); networking was broken so containers couldn't find each other (firewall on default settings broke it and the package didn't bother to un-break it on install—fix non-obvious if you're not deep into modern Linux firewalling); and I had to add flags to various container launches to get around selinux so they could once again see mounted host directories (again, not obvious selinux was at fault, and given the uid weirdness of Docker generally it could have been a bunch of things). Of course googling each of these led to a mix of solutions that did nothing, ones that just turned off all security, and, if one dug enough, the actual solutions, not well-marked as such.

In short, it was the quintessential "Linux UX".

Docker isn't supported on Fedora past Fedora 31 (https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/) or CentOS past CentOS 7 (https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/centos/).

What a heroic story! How long and how many people where involved solving the problem?

Try openSuSE if you want a rpm distro. 15.1 is rock solid and 15.2 is due to be released at the end of June.

for one thing Docker is rock solid on centos

didnt try using centos as desktop though

Coincidentally, same version number as Windows 10's latest update. :)

What is the logic behind this odd version number? I had to check whether this was a 16 year old announcement.

The version number leaves a weird impression.

Yay!

AFAIK the only reason people pay for RHEL licensing is they want commercial support. If you just like the distro, then CentOS is perfect.

(I do prefer Debian but that's mainly from getting started with Linux on Ubuntu).

There aren't too many choices if you need to deploy something important in the most boring, reliable and maintainable fashion.

I'm not a "fan" of CentOS like I'm not a fan of Toyota Hilux vehicles but both have their merits.

You make the comparison to the Hilux... and there are some HUGE fans of the Hilux specifically because it is extraordinarily reliable. Makes me wonder why there isn't a well known "boring, reliable" distro of Debian[1]... would Toyota mind if "Debian Hilux" were to come into being?

[1] I'm fairly certain there are distros derived from Debian which could be a "Hilux distro" but they aren't well-known to me.

Isn't Debian Stable the Hilux distro?

Are there LTS releases supported as long as CentOS?

(That's not rhetorical -- I honestly don't know.)

No, RHEL/CentOS aim for an absurd 10-year lifecycle, whereas Debian, even with LTS, is aiming for 5 years.

Compare https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/centos and https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/debian for exact figures.

If you want stability on bare metal servers without having to pay the RedHat license then CentOS is the way to go. I've using to work with lots of bare metal servers and we used to run debian on everything until we started to have issues with kernel panics on machines we used with xen. We changed a few machines to CentOS and never looked back, in a spam of a few months we migrated all servers to CentOS and had much less stability issues. Not to say that debian isn't very stable as well, but RedHat puts money and effort into making their distro run on various enterprise level hardware.

False dichotomy. I use CentOS because RHEL is the best Linux distro for me AND I don't have to pay for it.

What makes RHEL the best distro for you?

CentOS/Redhat used to be a classic Unix server version (up to around CentOS 6) and most sysadmins using it didn't care about alsa/pulseaudio/X/Gnome/usb/hotplug. systemd changed that, and CentOS is pretty weird now.

Ubuntu was a notebook-focused end-user distro. Not sure what it is in 2020.

If you never used early Linux or Unix distros, then Ubuntu might seem normal and you wouldn't notice the differences that I'm referring to.

People pay for Redhat if they're using commercial software and want support, like ERP software. The reason for that is since Linux doesn't have an Application Binary Interface (ABI) standard, commercial vendors can only support specific versions.

Top500 cluster owners were pissed when Redhat started charging per server and wouldn't give them a break, despite operating clusters of thousands of cookie-cutter servers.

I forget if I wrote a post on how shitty Linux is compared to any other OS, but the missing ABI and horrific help/man/info situations would be top of the list.

(You know if you're a linux expert and not a fanboi when you can list 10 things that linux completely sucks at.)

It's stable, supported for ages, they backport security fixes, they have a decent kernel team.

I use CentOS because it is Fedora with a slightly slower upgrade cycle. I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat Linux and I paid for a boxed set of CDs. Stability is nice.

I mean, yes, that's clearly the intention behind the distribution. As someone who works with RHEL everyday, why wouldn't I choose CentOS for my personal projects?

What would you recommend instead for servers? Debian?

What do you recommend? And why?