[ale] Fedora or Centos - which is more relevant for someone wanting Red Hat experience today?

[Brian W. Neu]

On 2/5/2010 4:27 PM, Michael H. Warfield wrote:


I'll second everything that Michael wrote. 

I run Fedora for production systems too, and simply upgrade every 12-18
months to prevent the support from deprecating.  I too run the "yum
upgrade" and while sometimes they are sometimes real PIA's, a successful
reboot is almost guaranteed.  I do make sure that I have the ability to
make an on-site visit in the event that the server doesn't reboot
successfully, but I've only had to do it maybe 5% of the time.  The
other 95% of time time "yum upgrade" is your best friend, and you never
have to change out of pajama pants.

The other huge advantage to running Fedora is that if you need something
bleeding edge such as btrfs or nilfs, the RPMS are there for you. 
Plenty of times I'd looked for software in the repo for a newer version
of Fedora, downloaded the SRPM and recompiled for my current release.

I firmly believe that Fedora provides the most flexibility, though it
does require more maintenance.  Though if you're looking to improve your
Redhat & sysadmin skills, it's probably the perfect proving grounds.  If
you want rock-solid support, few surprises, and minimal maintenance,
then CentOS is your best bet.

I wouldn't sweat the decision that much though as I agree with what many
others have said which is that the differences are minimal compared to a
switch to a different distro.  You'll still be in the RHEL neighborhood
no matter what you pick.