CentOS is a RedHat Enterprise 3 clone but without the service or purchase fees. It is built with actual RHEL source to make a reliable distribution with a 5 year support lifetime. Unless you have been under a rock for the past several years, you will know that 5 years of guaranteed support is an eternity for Linux. CentOS is 100% free, although they would prefer a $20 dontation for each server, and just as reliable as RHEL. For Servers, it is darn near perfect with quick security updated from the maintainers.

The positives of the "perfect server distro" weigh heavily on the workstation side. For most users, the long service lifecycle also means that typically the software versions can be slightly outdated. If you want 'bleeding edge' this is not a distro for you. Also I found the contrib software to be extremely lacking. Stuff such as K3b and totem were nowhere to be found, even on third party repos. Personally, the lacking of any version of the typical workstation software made me remove CentOS from my workstations.

As a note, I am a RedHat admin by trade, so it is rated based on my comparisions to other RPM based distros and how they would fit into my environment. Some may see this as important. With that said: Overall server rating is an 10 for me, but for a workstation it is about a 5. Averaged and rounded, overall it's an 8.

I downloaded CentOS 3.8 to replace RHEL 3 to get all the free and current updates. Same system,now updateable,runs flawlesley. Will be putting it on 2 others.up2date pre configured for you.

I also replaced my favorite OS,Fedora Core 1 with CentOS 3.8.I feel right at home and up2date with all I do with this PC.A great distro to learn Linux and enjoy its reliability.I cant wait for CentOS 5!!!!!!!!!