Red Hat is a very big name in the open source community. Not only is it one of the most well-known companies that profit off of open source, but they’re also responsible for Fedora, one of the most popular home distros. Their dedication to open source and free software is admirable, and because of this, most of the packages that make up Red Hat Enterprise Linux are readily available. This is how CentOS is made, by taking these files and using them to create a distro that is near identical to RHEL.
CentOS firmly sits in the stable category of Linux releases – packages are rarely the the very latest versions, the kernel used is much older and it even still has GNOME 2 as its desktop environment, all in the name of cutting down on bugs. While it is stable and capable of running on older tech, it isn’t as resource friendly as distros specifically geared towards being lightweight. Especially if you pick up the full DVD image of the distro, clocking in at nearly 2 GB, which carries multiple desktop environments and a lot of default apps.