Almost saying goodbye to innovation

Having used Fedora 10 for several days, I can say that this release is by far better than Fedora 9 in terms of desktop-related software quality. Of course, it is not bug-free and I still cannot consider it a desktop on which one can work efficiently. Having to deal with numerous known-bugs every six months is totally incompatible with any form of productivity. The last days, I have been considering trying to use CentOS as my primary desktop. It is a distribution I know very well. Even while Microsoft Windows was still my primary desktop, I had been using RedHat Linux, Mandrake Linux and later CentOS, which I currently use both on the Xen Dom0 and on DomUs, in a LAN-only headless home server. My real concern though is that this dull and predictable operating system is not suitable for a desktop. Despite the various community-driven RPM repositories, software availability is a big issue. It is nowhere near the number of packages that are available for Fedora. I recall the days of Fedora Core 3/4 when I was creating RPMs like crazy and I seriously do not wish to do it once again. Another serious drawback is that while usability bugs take months to get fixed on Fedora, it might take ages to see them fixed in CentOS. I’ve been using Fedora as my primary desktop for over 4 years and switching is not an easy decision. On the other hand, I use Fedora on my second server machine, on which this website is hosted, and I’ve never had any issues with it. It is rock solid. No matter which operating system is used, either the conservative CentOS or the innovative Fedora, server software runs perfectly. The real problem is the graphical applications. I’ve never used RedHat Linux in the past or CentOS as a desktop. What I am concerned with is that, if I finally try CentOS as a desktop and do not like it (very likely for the reasons I explaned above), then my only option would be to return back to a Windows desktop as I wouldn’t have any other choices left. This is something I will not like, but, on the other hand, I do not wish to become my computer’s slave for the sake of the freedom of computer software. Period.

This post is not supposed to start a flame about linux distributions, so please allow me to disable comments.

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