Linked by David Adams on Tue 27th Jul 2010 07:31 UTC, submitted by sjvn
Permalink for comment 434584
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Features
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/13/13 14:35 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/11/13 17:07 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/10/13 23:13 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/08/13 14:57 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/07/13 11:40 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 06/04/13 12:45 UTC
Linked by nfeske on 05/31/13 10:12 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/29/13 16:59 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/24/13 17:26 UTC
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 21:38 UTC
More Features »
Sponsored Links



Member since:
2005-07-06
My work 'standardized' on CentOS for the reason that a lot of our proprietary vendors specify it as the only thing they support. It's also the most 'Microsoft-like' out of all the Linux distros, which I think makes Windows Admins a bit more comfortable.
My problems with CentOS are pragmatic. I understand the philosophy behind it... and disagree entirely. Stability through obsolescence might have made sense years ago (debatable), but now it really doesn't.
Take my recent project, for example. I had to design and replace an aging server application (serving XML queries) running on redhat 9. The old design was a process forking mechanism, and quickly destroyed the memory on the system (1.2gigs of memory at 200 users). In order to cut development time down, and increase speed, I opted to use Qt. Since I needed certain features (like talking to a MS SQL database), I had to have any recent version of Qt from the last year or two.
My replacement written, and tested on my ubuntu and arch machines, I tried to put it on our CentOS server, which was just installed with CentOS 5.4. After a week of trying to get it to run, I gave up; there were too many random crashes and problems that simply did not occur on any linux distro that had the dependancies I needed; namely unixODBC, FreeTDS, and Qt. I convinced my work to use Ubuntu, and life was wonderful. CentOS simply couldn't run a modern application stably at all.
Is CentOS a 'bad' distro? Eh. I won't even go that far. But I know of no instance I would ever choose it over Arch (my preferred for it's tiny install footprint), or Ubuntu (which, admittedly, is more production grade).
But hey, that's the beauty of all of this; choice.