CentOS-6.10 Gnome a great distro which I didn't want to give up. However, EOL is near so moved to CentOS-7. CentOS-6 gave me an comfortable and easy feeling when booting-up and made me want to work. However, CentOS-7 did not transfer the happy interaction I had with Centos-6. Simply stated: I discovered CentOS-7 to be not appealing in many ways. I moved to mint-19 cinnamon. When I get blowback on this rant, perhaps I'll elaborate in greater detail.

I used to run CentOS 7 on Dell Precision 5520 laptop. Eventually switched to Fedora 30, which appears to run LOT better. Also Gnome desktop.

I personally like CentOS but not for a desktop because in order to do multimedia, you have to add in third party repositories and I don't trust those. I am probably being overly paranoid but that's me. Additionally, the sane version in CentOS lags behind most other distros and does not support my scanner so even CentOS 8 is a no-go for me.

I have only run CentOS 6 a couple of years ago and can't speak to 7 or 8 in terms of performance.

I was a bit put off by the change to SystemD, but I was coming from CentOS 5 after EOL (I hadn't been paying attention ), so just bit the bullet and learned what I had to learn to make it work on my server (no GUI), instead of learning another distro...I've been using RedHat/CentOS for about 20 years now.

Then, I installed it on a bare metal PC (this one), didn't much like the KDE desktop, so installed and now use Cinnamon. Haven't tried Gnome.

It is what it is. I'm happy with it.

Basically CentOS 7 is a free version of Red Hat Enterprise linux 7 which is based upon Fedora 19, uses an older kernel version 3.10 and by default uses Gnome 3. Since its designed purpose is for the enterprise market it typically uses older versions of applications and not really for the home desktop. It works great for its intended purpose and agree with scasey comments.

Please elaborate...

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Re Centos/RHEL 7 DE: I switched my C7 box to use MATE DE and that looks nice - bit like old gnome (v2 ?).

Unfortunately (atm) it looks like that option is not available on RHEL v8 - and apparently the new Gnome is more like a phone/ipad (imho).
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-h...server-changes.

However I am looking at trying https://www.reddit.com/r/CentOS/comm...e_in_centos_8/ when I get my new v8 machine.

could you just change the Desktop ?
- would that work, with your CentOS 7 ?

Yes it would. Please see #4, where I said I was using Cinnamon on a CentOS 7 desktop.

Installed tigervnc-server. Systemd is in the process of creating necessary files for server to run. Not having any prior experience creating such files, I had no reference whether or not systemd made it easier or harder. However, I found the process interesting and easy enough. I run KDE Plasma desktop and there are many things I like about centos7. In my original post, which began this con-flab, I was not kind to centos7. Actually, my post was simply to generate blow-back, and I did not receive much. I'm disappointed :-)

cheers

Installed Gnome Desktop (Replaced KDE) on centos- 7. Must say, it's an eye-opening experience working with it, very smooth :-)

What hardware are you running on ...server or your laptop?
What are specs of the system since you said it's running very smooth.

Personally I've been running Fedora for years on my laptop and desktop computer. No issue with Gnome for me.
CentOS 7 has a small learning curve .. systemd etc.

apologize for the delay, but crashed the system, and busy with recovery. I suppose it could be called a crash - the grub menu vanished. I had used Grub-Customizer many times, and successfully changed grub menu boot order, however, some glitch occurred, and grub menu disappeared. Not a clue to what went wrong. Machine does boot, and boots mint 19.3 Mate/xfce. I don't want to wash hard-drive, so giving this situation a great deal of attention. As you might had guessed, for now, centos-7 is lost, as well as several other distros.