Top 10 Benefits of CentOS over Fedora
Submitted by srlinuxx on Mon, 09/14/2009 - 13:59
CentOS or Community ENTerprise Operating System is often compared to Fedora in various Internet forums. CentOS is essentially a community supported free and open source operating system based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's targeted at people looking for enterprise-class operating system stability without the cost of certification and support. Whereas Fedora is a Red Hat sponsored, RPM based, free and open source operating system that runs the latest versions of software.When it comes to commercial use CentOS scores highly over Fedora. Let's see 10 benefits of CentOS over Fedora.
1. Operating Environment
Fedora is essentially a deskop oriented operating system. It has short release cycles and is a less stable in that respect. On the other hand CentOS has longer release cycles. This results in a more stable system and matured releases. Fedora has just 18 months of support cycle where as CentOS offers 5 years of support cycle. The last that needs to be calculated is that the average life cycle of a web browser is over 3 years. For a server based environment use of short life cycle operating system is not recommended. Obviously, CentOS is a better choice than Fedora in such environment. Further, CentOS strives to achieve RHEL package compliance, Fedora doesn't show much concern about that.
2. Speed
Fedora comes with a lot more programs than CentOS. However, when it comes to commercial application CentOS offers far more compatibility with commercial application, which is not the case with Fedora. Reducing the overload and sticking to more user centric programs makes CentOS faster.
RedHat vs. RedHat ? Two different products for two markets ?
As long as they are available, you can make comparisons. But is it worth your time?
Fedora is experimental and not backward compatible. It is to attract developers to do free programming for RedHat. Their own developers are working on fixing RHEL4/5s for revenue.
Centos is free and developed by a small group of people. Recently they almost give up. Centos is for business that had a few developers of their own to fix drivers and apps if they need them in Linux open source repositories.
Centos should be compared with XP? Then the fact that XP needs third party apps makes Centos the hands down choice. Centos saves money because you can use i386 servers, which small businesses do not have to throw out.
Centos can also serve as desktop on older computers. If doing cloud computing in the future requires constantly updated browser and server, Opera10Unite can be installed on centos forever.
The trouble, that people tend to think kernels are not compatible with libraries, is often overstressed. Linux depends on GNU system. You change kernel versions, you must change GCC versions, which comes with library of dependency files. But you may have to stick to i386(reduced instruction set) platform for Centos and use i386 apps. Any package system can be installed on Linux kernels, not distro specific. But some may have more missing bindings or blacklisted symlinks used by other distros.
It does not take a rocket scientist to tell R Stallman that kernel version, apps package systems and platforms all needed options in GCC versions and its library. So that, GCC is not the buggy source, the mother of all Linux errors and crashes.