Why would anyone want to use CentOS instead of another distro or instead of Fedora Core? It looks almost exactly the same as Fedora.

CentOS is actually based on Redhat Enterprise Linux, not Fedora. RHEL is based on the Fedora packages; Fedora essentially acts as a public beta for RHEL.

The difference is that the Redhat pacakges are more back-level and stabilized for commercial server use. Fedora is leading edge, and may include technologies that may not make it to RHEL.

So, to answer your question, folks use CentOS when:

- they have a room full of identical servers, and they pay for RHEL support on a small number of them. The problem resolutions RH provides on their supported servers apply to the CentOS machines as well. This save a considerable amount on support fees.

- they would otherwise use RHEL, but they have in-house Linux expertise, and don't need to pay for RH support.

- they use RHEL or CentOS on their servers, but don't want to pay for workstation support.

For a home user, CentOS or RHEL are really not ideal choices. The orientation of those distributions is for servers, not desktop use.

Fedora or Ubuntu (also almost identical to each other) are better choices for desktop users.

Fedora and Ubuntu are much different. They have similarities like all distros do, but they use different package managers (e.g. yum on FC and synaptic/apt-get on Ubuntu). Ubuntu uses deb packages just like Debian does, and Fedora uses rpm packages like Redhat does. Ubuntu runs much faster and better than Fedora.

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I compared FC and Ubuntu here. They are almost identical from an end-user perspective.