CentOS Reviews

It can be used for data centers to run the servers.

CentOS is a test bench for Red Hat. When Red Hat is testing new software, they will test it out in CentOS and Fedora. They will give it to the public, the public will complain about all the issues, then they will fix it, and include it in Red Hat.

I am not using it for the organization. However, I am using it in the business. For example, I help many clients back up Linux servers or protect Linux servers. But I am a Linux user at home, and I have been implementing products that revolve around Linux.

CentOS was one of the best Linux distributions out there. There was no community-based operating system like CentOS, except for Red Hat.

CentOS is very efficient and very powerful with many capabilities.

Anyone who has been using CentOs from the beginning of time has been using it because it has been a stable platform. Many companies have made solutions based on CentOS because it was a stable platform.

Unfortunately, Red Hat has changed the direction of the project.

The community is shocked that CentOS is no longer that stable branch, it's that development branch. 

They have now started a new project that some vendors are involved with, which is called Rocky Linux. 

Rocky Linux is a new Linux distribution that continues with what the community started with CentOS. The community now is making creating their own CentOS, because of Red Hat's decision to make this CentOS a test bench.

Most of the vendors in the market right now are making appliances, whether it be a firewall or a storage appliance, and most of them are using CentOS. Imagine the impact this will have on the vendors, on an international level, because they are relying on CentOS to be the most stable Linux distribution, and they chose the solution based on stability.

Red Hat made the decision of making CentOS a test bench, which means it will no longer be stable. Vendors will either push the new unstable update to customers, which is not something they would likely do or they would need to change to another Linux distribution.

It's a major decision for many companies to make. Because it is now a test bench many people are forced to change.

I was using CentOS because it was very stable, and now it's not. Will I use it? No. 

The main reason people use CentOS was because of its stability. Now that the stability has been compromised, no one will use it, unless they are Red Hat developers. The people who are learning Red Hat will also like it. But for us, the community, who might have been relying on CentOS as being a very stable platform, we will discard it.

I have been using CentOS for five years.

We used version CentOS 6, and CentOS 7, but the latest one is CentOS 8.

CentOS had proven to be very stable, but now with the updates, CentOS is not the stable operating system that it used to be. 

CentOS is not supported commercially. CentOS is a community project. If you have any issue, you open the forums online, you post about it, and they solve it for you. 

Red Hat is the one that is charging for it. You can buy Red Hat and purchase support from them and they'll support you.

If you know your way around Linux, then it is easy to install CentOS.

Most of it is the command line. There is a graphical user interface installation, but if you know CentOS, you don't want to do anything with the graphics. Instead, you will want to do everything with the command line, otherwise, you should consider Ubuntu.

I can install any Linux on my own, with no worries.

There are no licensing fees for CentOS. It's a DPL project, there is no licensing cost.

CentOS, Red Hat, Oracle Linux, and Fedora all share the same binaries, they have the exact same distribution, with very minor differences. 

CentOS started as a community project, a community enterprise operating system. It's basically free Red Hat. Red Hat was rebranded and called CentOS and released to the public.

I have had a really good experience with CentOS 6 or CentOS 7, but I have abandoned CentOS completely since Red Hat has made its position of CentOS very clear. CentOS now is discontinued. 

Red Hat is releasing CentOS Stream, which is new. Before, what used to be the situation? Red Hat would release the Red Hat Linux distribution online version six, for example, at the same time, Red Hat would release CentOS 6. Red Hat and CentOS 6 had no differences, except the fact that with Red Hat you can actually get a support contract, whereas, with CentOS 6, you cannot get a support contract. 

CentOS and Red Hat are the same. There's no difference between CentOS and Red Hat.

There used to be no difference between CentOS and Red Hat, but now CentOS is like Fedora.

There's no difference, it's just a test bench, with the latest updates, but it is not as stable as it is before.

Now, there was something called Fedora. Fedora is a Linux-based distribution. Usually, you have the latest updates, the brand new technologies, everything is in the Fedora, but it's not stable. Fedora is not stable.

Red Hat is the one controlling CentOS. Whenever Red Hat would release a version, they would release the same CentOS to the public. The only difference was that CentOS is supported by the community, and Red Hat is supported by Red Hat, the enterprise by the business. They used to have a test bench, which is Fedora. Fedora is a distribution based both on Red Hat or CentOS, but packages are very up to date, which is not stable. Now, Red Hat made a decision to stop CentOS and make something new called CentOS Stream. This CentOS Stream is just like Fedora.

It's not as stable as Red Hat. Before Red Hat was releasing a free version and a paid version. Both the free and the paid were the exact, same, they were identical, there were no differences. 

It has the same stability and the same everything. Now, CentOS is a test bench in which Red Hat releases the newest and latest code so that they can try it out on the community, to ensure that it is fine before they include it in Red Hat. CentOS is like Fedora. Good for testing, not for production, and not for servers.

For the time being, I would not recommend this solution to others. 

At one time CentOS was definitely a nine out of ten, but now with these recent updates, I would rate CentOS a zero out of ten. Imagine if you would create something for a specific purpose, but then in the middle, you would change it and make it the exact opposite. That would make any person who chose it, hate it.

I am very frustrated with the way the CentOS project has gone. I would rate it a Zero out of ten.

We just see it as an operating system to run our applications. We're in the media industry and we make a lot of TV programs and OTT items. We have developed backend applications that make, let's say, 10 locations happen or make OTT happen.

Everything is running on CentOS due to the fact that it's lightweight. It's not a huge overhead. It's not like Windows eating up a lot of CPU resources. 

The performance in the past, the open-source approach, has been great. 

It helps us with our internal applications for very low pricing.

All our applications internally have been running on CentOS since 2006 when I joined the company so we have been developing on things like that.

We use the solution due to the fact that it's a lightweight, powerful, stable OS. It's being used for a lot of different use cases. 

The stability is very good.

The pricing is good. We pay a minimal fee.

Often, the solution doesn't scale as you expect.

I cannot recall if there are features that need improvement or if there's anything that should be added.

For me, it just has to perform and carry our application. I don't really care about how the user interface looks like as we don't use the user interface. We have an application running on it and that needs to be stable and that's the only thing. Therefore, we have no issues with the solution and don't feel it's missing anything.

The solution is stable, however, it could always be even more stable if possible.

CentOS recently announced some changes. I'm not sure what they will be, however, we look forward to seeing what they come out with. 

I've been using the solution for about ten to 12 years or so. It's been a very long time.

The solution is very stable. The reason that we have standardized the usage of CentOS is the stability. It has proven to us to be very stable compared to other options. 

I'm running around 1,400 CentOS VMs at the moment.

In terms of scalability, of course, things don't scale always as you want, however, it's a powerful solution.

The Dutch organization where I work has eight people on the payroll, however, we are not the users. We are the people building the backend and we have hundreds of thousands of people using the applications running on the data center. The people that watch OTT or watch television make use of parts of the installation.

I'm not on the operational side of the business and therefore have never been in touch with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

We are using Ubuntu, CentOS, and also Red Hat. It really depends on the applications. If we buy applications or we use applications from vendors, if they say it has to run on Red Hat we'll run Red Hat. If they say it better runs on CentOS, it will run on CentOS. We have all the different file systems as we run applications that we buy or rent from vendors that make the applications.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. We have been using it for a long time it's an automatic deployment and has templates. People just have to click on the template being installed in the background. It's an automated process in VMware.

The end-user can go to the portal and they can just select which type of machine they want to have and which CentOS release is being deployed. It's a matter of minutes until they can log in.

A company really doesn't need outside assistance. It's fairly automated and simple to manage. 

The pricing is very reasonable. From what I understand, we pay a minimal fee, if we pay anything at all.

We use different versions of the solution. It's a mixture depending on the application. Some applications are not upgraded by vendors and therefore we are using old versions. We try to stay with our own applications on the latest and greatest, however, generally, it's a mixture.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

We use CentOS whenever we can to help bridge services or to add another layer to our infrastructure. We currently use CentOS for monitoring orientated tasks, but it has been our chosen distribution for our enterprise for a few years.

It allows us to freely use and test open-source technologies and solutions. Without it we wouldn't have a server monitoring system, log management system, or many other services that we depend on.

It has minimal updates compared to other distributions. We like the idea of long-term support. CentOS gives us a peace of mind when it comes to updates. It's also a bonus that most of our vendor supported hardware/software is built with CentOS under the hood, allowing us to stay in the Fedora ecosystem.

You're getting what you expect (a linux distro). The wizard has gotten better through the years, so maybe they could build more options into the wizard. However, we have scripts that we deploy to overcome this.

Three to six years.

I don't believe an update has broken anything in our environment. It's very stable and that's the reason CentOS was chosen.

Yes and no. In regards to the OS itself, there aren't any scalability issues. We have run into issues with other applications but that's not the fault of CentOS, rather, it is the application that would need to be revised.

We've used Ubuntu in the past for various systems and projects, and once in a while, a vendor uses it for their platform. We don't care for the more aggressive updates, and we usually don't need the most updated packages.

Straightforward. We deploy with the minimal options, and the wizard is very easy to navigate to help install it. We also have a script that we run to make this process much easier.

In-house for anything related to CentOS.

We don't track ROI.

You can pay for the support if you purchase Red Hat. We don't have the need for that just yet, and CentOS satisfies our needs when needed (assuming we can support it in-house).

When it comes to Linux, we've tried the Debian route before. Trying both Debian and Ubuntu, we settled on CentOS once we noticed that the enterprise market was going in that direction. It proved to be a wise choice.

If you had to choose a Linux distribution for enterprise grade stability, then this would be the logical choice. If you want latest features and fast deployment of updates, then you might want to take a look at Ubuntu.

We have very varied, different uses. Mostly it's an appliance for applications.

It's required for some of the applications we have. In order to run those applications, we have to have CentOS.

It's easy to install.

They're changing how they're working, and I really enjoy the easy updates. Now they're going to a streaming version, which I don't like. We want to control the updates manually. We have an application that we don't want to be updated without our knowledge.

If you want to do something special on install, you can. But when they have 68 questions about how you want to install, you answer each one of them. A very simple, default install would be nice.

I've been using CentOS for more than 12 months.

The solution is extremely scalable. We have about 200 people using it at this point, mostly engineers or database guys.

We'll probably have a minor increase in usage, but not a huge increase in how many nodes we'll have.

CentOS has no technical support. You just look it up if you have a problem.

Red Hat is the paid version of Linux. They take out all the Red Hat stuff and make CentOS Linux with no support. But a lot of people use it, and a lot of people post. So if you have a problem, you just look online and it's fine.

I did use Red Hat a long time ago, and I switched because they couldn't seem to decide how they wanted to charge for their service. I was perfectly happy to just pay them, but it would range by huge amounts. I couldn't maintain that.

The initial setup is in between straightforward and complex. It could be easier. There are too many options, and I'd like a lot less.

Deployment takes a half-hour, and we did it in-house. One person, myself, takes care of deployment and maintenance.

There are zero licensing costs for the solution. 

There are admin costs. We run it on VMware, so there has to be VMware cost.

There were a few other options, but CentOS is heavily used and that helps.

Just be aware of the changes they're about to make, which is from the regular updates to streaming. That's major.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten. It's easy to install, it's easy to manage, it's free.

We use CentOS in conjunction with our applications and databases.

It's free — it's an open-source solution. It has all the features of Red Hat, but you don't have to pay for the subscription. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as Red Hat Linux. It uses all of the same repositories, the only difference is that it's open-source.

Integration with other platforms could be improved. There should also be more repositories. There are ways to get data from the repositories, but it could be enhanced.

I have been using CentOS since 2019.

Version 7 is stable — not the recent versions; I believe they have some issues. We are using a stable version as of now. We haven't faced any issues so far.

CentOS is scalable.

I have contacted their support, but it's not commercial technical support. On their website, there are blogs and other users that help. They have a large community that can answer most questions.

Before CentOS, we used Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The reason why we approached CentOS is that it has the same flavor, but there is no subscription. Earlier, we were paying for Red Hat Linux on a yearly subscription. In order to minimize the cost, especially for some of the applications, it didn't make sense to pay on a yearly basis. 

The initial setup is not very straightforward — it's intermediate. Linux is not an easy thing to install. If you don't have the knowledge, it can be a little difficult.

I believe there is a desktop version available that has a UI but we haven't tried it. That might be a little easier to install; but since it's on a server, we needed to use the command prompt.

We installed it ourselves.

There is no price or licensing required — it's open-source. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. 

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. Not the desktop version — I don't have experience with it. On a server level, I would definitely recommend it.

It can be used for setting up virtual spaces and the development environment. We have CentOS VPS.

The user access level is most valuable. When you do administration with CentOS, the number of customizations that you can do for each user is higher than other solutions. It is very customizable.

Its memory consumption is much lower than any other OS.

The YUM install manager can be improved. It is below average as compared to the other install managers. This is the only major problem that I see with CentOS. They should reduce dependency on the YUM manager.

They can improve the help for features. It has so many features, but there is no help. They should provide more information and tutorials. Currently, because of the lack of knowledge or availability of resources, features are getting underutilized.

I have been using CentOS for around two years.

It is quite stable.

It is one of the top-notch products in terms of scalability. For scalability, many premium features are available.

Currently, we have around 12 to 15 users. We have plans to increase its usage.

We don't have much experience with their technical support.

Its installation was quite straightforward. There is not much in terms of the setup cost. It was quite straightforward, and it happened quite quickly. From scratch, it took around one and a half hours.

I installed it myself. For its deployment and maintenance, we don't have any technical team. We are able to manage with less than one person per month. We have a manager who manages it.

It is open-source, which means it is a free product. It has a one-time deployment cost.

I evaluated Red Hat.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate CentOS a nine out of ten.

The solution has many types of use cases. 

The configuration is very good. It is very easy to configure any application, et cetera.

The current version is stable.

The initial implementation is straightforward. 

The product is free to use.

Previous versions were unstable. 

I've been using the solution for close to four years. 

The solution is stable in its current form. This wasn't always the case. In earlier versions, it wasn't as stable as it is now. Currently, there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. However, you do occasionally do still get some unstable packages.

The solution is only really scalable if you handle on-premises versions. However, you can scale it up and down as you need. 

We have close to 300 users using the product right now. 

I've never had to use technical support as everything is pretty straightforward. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The installation is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have too much trouble handling it. 

The deployment is very quick. It's up and running in a matter of minutes. 

I've always handled the implementations myself. I've never used a consultant or integrator. It's easy to handle in-house. 

This product is free to use. It's great for companies with small budgets.

I have a hybrid setup. On the cloud, I'm using version 7.5. On-premise I'm on 8.3.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. If it was more reliable in terms of dealing with stability, it would be excellent. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies.

Most of the time, I use CentOS for deploying Tomcat to run web applications. I use it to run Docker, as well.

The most valuable feature is that it is compatible with RedHat. 

In the future, CentOS will no longer be compatible with Red Hat. I would prefer that it remains compatible because when it changes, we will no longer be using it.

What is missing from this product is a real file system like CFS. Having a modern file system is important and in CentOS 7, btrfs was supported. However, in version 8 it has been removed. I don't understand why and I think that it was a very bad move and a very customer-unfriendly thing to do.

I have been working with CentOS for a few years.

CentOS is quite stable.

In the company, we have approximately 800 people who are using it. Beyond that, a lot of our customers are using it, as well.

I have never been in contact with technical support. We manage it ourselves.

For as long as I have been with the company, they have been using CentOS.

The installation is mostly straightforward. We have automated it.

There are no licensing costs for CentOS.

At this point, because of the announcement that it will no longer be compatible with Red Hat in the future, I do not recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.