Is it time to drop all of the installations of CentOS and go with Scientific Linux instead?

SciLinux 6 is already out. Centos 6...

I tried Scientific Linux 6 and found I had a bad bug in OpenOffice Writer, which did not inspire confidence. I also found I had no sound, as they only provide the drivers available in Red Hat, while CentOS add anything that's missing by using Fedora. And the download took 7 hours!

The delay in CentOS 6 is because they had to provide 5.6 before they did 6 and, as I said, they offer more hardware support than Scientific Linux.

Different niche.

I recently took Scientific Linux 6.0 for a test drive on my desktop, impressive. But it has some changes/customizations from the "upstream vendor" unlike CentOS which is a faithful clone.

On the other hand, plenty of servers in the world are still happily chugging along with CentOS 4.x. If they haven't upgraded to 5.x yet, then I doubt their admins care whether CentOS 6 is delayed a few more weeks.

Also I am surprised you did not mention RHEL. If you want/need the latest updates as soon as they're released, just pay a few $$$ and then you don't need to worry about CentOS politics.

I just installed Scientific Linux 6. I haven't had a chance to test it so I haven't found the problems with it yet.

My impression is that Scientific Linux 6 really just replaces branding and recompiles the Red Hat source code while CentOS spends a lot of time trying to fix bugs. I am basing that on the threads in the CentOS new group. I guess that is one reason that CentOS is taking so long to release version 6 in addition to what DavidMcCann said about CentOS releasing v5.6 before v6.0.

I used CentOS v5.5. I would say that its look and feel were more geared toward a server environment while the Scientific Linux 6 looks and feels very oriented toward a workstation environment. When I installed CentOS v5.5 the installer asked if I wanted collections of applications for a server such as Samba Server and FTP server. The Scientific Linux v6 installer did not ask anything like this. I don't know how this will compare to genuine Red Hat v6.0 server installation.

I like the Scientific Linux 6 but I am definitely going to install CentOS 6 when it is released just to see the differences between the two distributions.

I'm assuming this is the type of thread that has good potential to go down hill.

Does Scientific Linux meet your needs? Then go for it. Does CentOS meet your needs better? Then wait for it. Do you need RHEL6 right now and SL6 doesn't quite cut it and CentOS 6 has not yet been released? Then buy it (RHEL).

You assume wrong.

Stress_Junkie: I installed Scientific Linux 6, and I have to say, I am very pleased with it. I feel that they strip it down a good bit, which starts it out with less junk and services and such.

But I've primarily used Centos5.x for the last couple of years, so I support their efforts completely. I'm interested to see what the Centos project does with the RHEL6 code, compared to SL. And also, I'd keep an eye on the updates/releases etc... to see if SL is more closely mirroring RHEL's schedules and updates than Centos, since Centos is so late.

Who knows. It might turn out that the SL is more actively maintained than Centos now, and get a bigger server market share. Although I'm sure that it isn't SL's intention.

I think it will be an interesting year for the Community Enterprise linuxes.