As all of you consider CentOS to be the Debian equivalent in the rpm world, I agree. I would give CentOS a try. I hope I would find a at least a reasonable number of non-enterprise software for CentOS. Also is it possible to find out mature software from Fedora repositories and use them in CentOS?

I have always used DEB based distros. Now I wish to try RPM based distros.

There are some very good RPM-based distros. I got challenged on that very same question in a different conversation. I realized it not so much the *.deb format that I preferred--it wasn't the packages, it was the package management. The Debian tools--aptitude, apt-get, and synaptic--are superb. The rpm package management tools work just fine, but the *.deb tools are superb.

Just my two cents.

Genuine questions:
Why are they superb in your opinion? I only read your emotional opinion (being "used too use them" type), not technical
E.g. What can debian tools do that RPM tools cannot? and are they (the answer to the previous question) of real miss? or is it handy that it's there, but not often used in daily usage type? Again genuine questions.. Maybe i concur maybe not.. awaiting your answers

Rpm tools can be just as good. I personally am not a fan of yum simply because of decisions that Red Hat made that makes me dislike Red Hat. That decision is how they package. In debian, you can install a metapackage to pull in all the programs of a type (lets say for instance kdepim), but you can also install each one individually. Red Hat not so. The kdepim package is the kde pim programs, you get all or nothing. This is my personal opinion, and I'm sure many people could care less.

However, the tools used in some of the other rpm distros, Mageia in particular (urpmi, urpme, urpmq, and yes I'm aware they weren't designed by Mageia, but I don't remember if they were Mandrake or Mandriva or someone else and too lazy to look it up) I think are every bit as good as anything on Debian.

PClinux uses RPM packages with apt-get and synaptic package managers. I don't know whether it is good for server or not but despite it's rolling release model, it is a stable OS for desktop.

There is no other distro like Debian!

Seriously though, yes CentOS is stable and LTS but its software repositories are very limited. If you add a dozen of other repos, you might even install something really niche like, VLC. Uhmm.
IMHO your only bet would be CentOS & to roll your own RPMs.

I've been using PCLinuxOS for over ten years and have found it to be a very stable and easy to use distro. As noted above, it's RPM based and uses the excellent Synaptic package manager for updating and installing etc. It has almost 13000 packages available in it's repositories which covers virtually everything the average user would ever want, has an active and friendly forum and also a free monthly magazine with all sorts of hints, news and useful articles on the use of various software. Being a rolling release means that it's always up to date and virtually never needs reinstalling, unlike Ubuntu etc, ie very little maintenance required.

As you can see, I'm a happy user of CentOS. I arrived at it as a refugee from the roller-coaster ride of Fedora after trying (and disliking) Debian.

There are lots of repositories to support it
https://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalRe...s/Repositories
The vital thing is to set their priorities, so that they can't alter the main installation
http://wiki.centos.org/PackageManagement/Yum/Priorities

For more stuff (including repositories not mentioned by CentOS)
http://pkgs.org/
http://rpm.pbone.net/

You can get things from Fedora if you use the version that RHEL is built on, although it doesn't always work simply and compiling is often better. In fact, I have only one Fedora program: Agave.

Hi
Been using PCLinuxOS, an RPM based distro for 12+ years without a problem. It's a rolling release, uses Synaptic, Apt and
is a very stable. uses SU instead of SUDO, is highly configurable and easy to use. There are several community releases eg TDE, XFCE, LXDE, Dark Star etc, all Live USB or DVD. Overall a brilliant distro with a very friendly forum and a really useful monthly magazine. Have used several other DEB etc distros, but always come back to PCLinuxOS because, as they say, it just works.
Highly recommended.

Note that RPM is the standard package format for Linux according to the Linux Standard Base. If your distribution uses a different format, your distribution violates the standard.

While off topic, this is also not entirely true. LSB only states that a distro must SUPPORT RPM, not that it must USE rpm.

Which non-RPM distro supports RPM?

Technically Debian has supported it since 2.0 or 3.0 (alien package). No doubts there are others. However that's not the important part. The important part is any distro that wanted to be LSB-compliant (and even Debian has given up because noone cares) they only need to implement support of RPM, they can use whatever they want for installing of updates.

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Slackware. I'm pretty sure that compliance with that standard is why RPM has always been a standard part of it.

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