Anyone running CentOS on a PC?

For the last few years I have been using Win7 mainly due to convenience. This relates mainly to a wireless printer and specific programmes such as WPS Office. I have privacy concerns relating to Win10 (also read this malware is being back-ported to Win7 through security updates). I would not use Cortana and do not need a social app environment. WPS Office is now available on Linux (not sure about wireless printers). As I have some spare time I have decided to make a full transition to Linux.

I did try a few Linux distros a few years ago and preferred Fedora over Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I have also run a CentOS VPS for a couple of years and learned a great deal, particularly security aspects (initially 6 and 7 for the last 6 months).

My instincts are to go with a RHEL based distro due to my server experience. Running a server is obviously different from a home pc but the operating system experience is relevant to me. This narrows it down to Fedora and CentOS. I did some reading online and from what I can gather the only difference is cutting edge/potential instability (Fedora) versus security/stability (CentOS).

I do like using YUM from the command line but Fedora has now changed to DFN. Fedora offers different desktop environments in ISOs whereas CentOS does not. Not sure this will be an issue as not really read much on the different flavours (KDE, Gnome etc).

I did find this link which shows you how to configure CentOS 7 to make it home pc friendly (or as the author states " into a truly remarkable desktop lean mean killing machine". To quote the author

"With a bit of third-party help, CentOS 7 is a modern, relevant, elegant and fully featured distribution with all the perks, goodies and advantages you find in most popular Debian family releases. Plus ten years of robustness. Plus more. Still more. I am totally pleased, and now it's time to expand my usage of this Fedora-19-based gem, because it has everything you need: a modern kernel, stability and tons of great apps. Bloody good."

This article was written over a year ago and CentOS 7 is now well established. Is anyone using CentOS on a home pc? Has anyone used both Fedora and CentOS? Which one did you prefer?

Thanks for any help/guidance.

personally i'd just pick a quiet day then image the machine to an external drive and slap it in a draw and have a go...if its just not working then pick up the drive from the draw and restore back

You do seem to have some *nix experience and aint afraid of the old command line so thats a start and as for UI preferences....it seems like every week theres a fork of some project due to someone can't stand someone else so that may be one which only you truely can fart around with till you get the perfect thing and technically if you don't mind putting the effort in you normally can recompile pretty much anything to work on any variant but after that you're on your own supporting it

CUPS for printing is pretty robust and should be able to deal with most printers but give their website a view as normally it'll tell you anything that just won't play ball

I use Fedora myself since I am highly allergic to software I have to pay for. You can get a live distribution of Fedora which allows you to boot off of a flash drive or DVD and use the system without installing it or replacing your existing system. It might be just want you want to test drive Fedora with a no risk option.

Yes , I have experimented running CentOS on PCs.Generally , it is ok. Nothing to write home to mom about.

Thanks for the posts. As suggested I have put Fedora 22 on a spare drive. Playing around with it today. So far so good.

Will look into CUPS. Thanks

a reply to: deliberator

I use Centos all the time for my development and occasionally as a Desktop. I have the following notes. First,
you install the minimum and then spend a few hours doing yum package installs. I install development, open
office, network management, etc, etc, etc. Second, I do a lot of media work and so I use the Nvidia driver which
is a little annoying to install but works great once there. If you do not need GPU/CUDA or do not play back a
ton of videos you might be able to get by with the installed graphics driver. Third, I found Centos 7 took away
many of the things that I needed in the user interface, and I did not need the virtualization stuff that it provided, so
I backed off from Centos 7 and went with the latest Centos 6 (6.5 ? 6.6 ?) release. Fourth, you have to jump through hoops to get VLC installed but it can work. Other than that I find Centos 6 to be very reliable and usable and have no complaints.

MW

a reply to: michaelw

Thanks for the post. I am currently testing out Fedora 22. Hated the Gnome 3 desktop. I have KDE Plasma installed which I prefer.

So far so good and I like the pre-installed packages. Figured out how to open Dolphin as root today.