“Some folks love life on the edge, so they run Debian Unstable,
or the newest Ubuntu or Fedora releases. These are all wonderful
Linux distributions, and under most circumstances are reliable
enough. You’ll run into weird dependency issues, or find out the
hard way that the latest release of an application has a few
problems, or that the distribution maintainers introduced entirely
new applications that are chock-full of amusing surprises. For the
most part they work well, but you never know when they’re going to
get bored and have a little fun at your expense.Then there are the brave souls who dare to be dull and don’t
want surprises. They just want their systems to chug along and not
need a lot of babysitting. For these fine folks there is CentOS
Linux. CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), built
from RHEL’s SRPMs (source RPMs, and please note the correct absence
of apostrophes in RPMs.) It is free of cost, though you might show
your appreciation by clicking the donation link…”