Hi, I plan to build a new PC shortly for home use. I have used Fedora for a while but I am thinking of Centos 7 this time around. I don't do a lot of cutting edge stuff hence the change. I normally take tips from an Aussie web site when it comes to buying the relevant bits

https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_sg..._basic_configs

I am looking at the configuration labelled "budget transformer". Does this look sufficient for Centos? At the moment my PC runs:

• firefox
• a couple of terminal windows
• a VM in constant use for get_iplayer
• thunderbird
• Libreoffice

I also have 2 terminal windows connected to Raspberry Pis via SSH and I connect to transmission on a Pi with X windows.

Any thoughts?

Yes, but I'd suggest NOT using CentOS. My personal opinion is that CentOS/RHEL/SLES are made for servers...things that 'consumers' want to do (play videos? sound? bluetooth? etc.), may need some fiddling with, and some hardware may not work at all. Granted, that list is getting shorter all the time, but you can do all you mention with pretty much ANY distro of Linux.

I like openSUSE Tumbleweed, but Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu would all also be good choices. Staying in the Red Hat 'ecosystem' (since you know Fedora) may be easier, and there's nothing wrong with Fedora. Your call, of course.

I second the reservations about using CentOS on the desktop.

Linux Mint is probably the desktop with the most polish as far as having things just work goes.

I can think of one thing wrong with Fedora: it's bleeding edge. Not everyone likes that. Installing Mint will mean learning a new package system.

For 99% of uses, that's about 30 seconds of reading even if one uses the shell. Of the two, RPM versus APT, even though I was more familiar with RPM, I found APT much easier to deal with, YMMV of course.

However, with the graphical interfaces, the package management is different for each distro and sometimes each version of each distro.

The only thing I'll add is if you decide to go CentOS, wait for CentOS 8. CentOS 7 you might be able to get running with that, but you'd be missing a LOT of hardware support (graphics). CentOS 8 is also switching to dnf from yum so you won't have to reaclimate to yum from using Fedora.

Otherwise, I agree with the posts above. CentOS is AMAZING on servers...so so on desktops.

Also, as far as the build, if you can, bump the SSD up to a 500 GB class. The density of nand in modern desktops means the performance plateau is now there instead of the 250 GB class.

While I agree with the above that something like Linux Mint, or even something like openSUSE, etc would be better for the desktop, and easier to get going; you can install the latest kernel version (or close to) on CentOS. But you wouldn't get the latest kernel version, nor things like VLC, multimedia codecs for popular formats, etc by default.

If you're new to Linux, I'd suggest you take the advice above. That said, CentOS CAN be used as a desktop system, and will give you a very stable system - but will be more work to get setup for the desktop. Also, depending on the ISO image you download, you may need to explicitly select a graphical environment to be installed, as it might not be selected by default.

Thanks for all the feedback. I guess I'll have to decide on a distro once I have got the bits.

Cheers