Hello all and thanks in advance for the information you'll provide. I've read a few posts and you all seem very helpful and professional. I have recently bought a new computer and plan to convert the OS of my old computer to Linux. I am in the capstone for my Bachelor's in IT so I have a pretty good understanding of computers. I may look into earning certificates with RedHat so I am thinking about using CentOS as my distro. My questions are:

1. Is it a good distro for beginners? (Again, I have programming and IT education)

2. Does anyone recommend any step-by-step (video or document) tutorials to completing the switch?

Thanks in advance for the responses and if this post is in the wrong thread, just tell me and I'll move it!

Patrick

Welcome to the forums! Not sure how close RH and CentOS are in the context of getting a RH certification. I believe Red Hat EL is available to developers for free if you register with Red Hat. I don't think you get support with it though but believe you get updates via RH update/satellite or whatever it is called these days. That might be a better bet since it will be identical to whatever you are certifying on. There "may" be slight differences in CentOS, not sure, I haven't used it in years and have never compared it to RH. I know CentOS is a debranded RH but there are probably proprietary things in RH that the CenntOS folks cannot include.

Good luck on your BS!

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From what I've read/watched, CentOS is a free, stable version of RH (there's more to that, I know). RHEL you have to pay for, do you have to pay for RH?

RH and CentOS come from the same branch, that's why I'm thinking CentOS, but hey any advice anyone has I'll listen. I'm a newb.

Welcome to LQ,

I really don't have much cross experience, especially with RHEL because I'm just not a server type of person. Either case, CentOS is as cited, a debranded version of RHEL.

Certification, you should seek study guides for RedHat.

I'm sure that CentOS will give you some great guides to setting it up. Please review their documentation.

Question is very much in a great forum, but if you like, we can move it to the CentOS sub-forum if you like. You can click Report on your first post, or any post honestly, and then write in the dialog box to please move your thread to another forum, be that CentOS or elsewhere. And it will be moved.

Best of luck as you progress. I think your instructors should very much be great resources to help you, because of the major concentration you are following.

I believe the way it works is "for support" and upgrades, updates, you need to pay for it. But you also can download it and use it, as a registered developer. You get some level of knowledge, help, but not much, it's not some backdoor free pass to gain their distribution. But the first statement that CentOS is a free stable version of RHEL is accurate. As far as that gets you regarding RH certification study and otherwise, I cannot say. As already said by me, given your major, you really should discuss this with instructors, I can't imagine that they will be blind to certification, etc.

Welcome.

I would like to ask two clarifying questions: Which operatings systems (plural) your courses have covered to-date? Also, what would be the goal with Red Hat as opposed to regular Debian / Devuan?

As for Red Hat specifically, there are several tools and services which aren't ported to CentOS. That would mean paying for temporary access to the training materials to learn those.

No courses that I've taken have covered anything Linux. I choose to take programming as a concentration rather than networking, etc.

I should clarify, too, that whichever distro I choose will be for my personal use as another family computer.

A server distribution is not suitable for your personal/family use computer.

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I was not aware there were server based distros. I'll have to look into this a bit more. Thanks!

Thanks. The overwhelming catalog of distros can be found at DistroWatch. However, that will show you too many. Most of the popular ones will be either Fedora derivatives or Debian derivatives anyway and the main difference there would be the package manager(s) and the package format(s). Since you are entering computing from a programming perspective, it might be of interest to note there are easy methods for rolling your own packages or customizing existing ones. Though perhaps that is for later. At the intro level, all packages can be fetched from the distro's repository and installed (or removed) with a couple of clicks.

A comfortable choice for a home desktop distro would be Linux Mint. It has a lot of the common desktop-oriented packages and codecs preloaded, along with some nice configuration.

Like any other set of GNU/Linux distros Linux Mint distinguishes itself from the others by its selection of pre-installed packages and its selection of preconfigurations. However, you can still add, remove, or reconfigure packages to tweak it to be like most of the other distros. It has three variants in regard to pre-configuration, the most visible will be the Desktop Environment: Cinnamon, or MATE, or XFCE. All three come with a live version so you can boot it without actually installing anything. Then when you have found the one which is closest to your liking, you can install that and make accounts for everyone and they can customize to their hearts' content without interferring with each other.

You can contrast it to the Live versions of Fedora. However, if you really want to dig in and learn all the components, the Linux From Scratch would be the way to go, but that would be a learning project and not ready to go from day one. Or if your training curriculum at school has used more classical UNIX or BSD then Slackware might be more familiar. But just as a generic home desktop, I'd say start with Linux Mint.

Any of those distros will have several common scripting languages (shell, awk, perl, python3, etc.) available out of the box and will have a plethora of compilers and other scripting languages ready for installation with a click or two. Keep in mind that the whole GNU/Linux environment itself is an "IDE".

Cent is not a bad distro but it is not the best for an everyday operating system

I dual boot cent 7 and opensuse

cent i use for scientific software and suse for every day use

see the cent wiki for guides
https://wiki.centos.org/

Up until the point when RedHat 7 certification was still available, I would say, yes you could install centos 7 and practice stuff on it, since I had done so myself.

With the RHEL 8 certification, the RHCSA on RHEL 8 is at par with what a junior linux administrator would be required to know.

But personally I am not happy with RHCE on RHEL 8 stuff, since the focus is too much on deployment with ansible and not on the concepts of CIFS/NFS/iscsi/apache/mariadb/DNS/firewall etc. So the troubleshooting knowledge which is expected of a Senior administrator is not developed for candidates preferring the easy way (mug up dumps, example papers and pass). Poor souls who turn up for interviews do not even realize how easy to understand the difference between mug up and hard work is with just few questions on scenarios that you face in real life !

So, @Volter, you might want to do some research and see if centos 8 can be a like for like replacement of RHEL 8 for certification purposes, specially for RHCE.

Of course, you can use whatever distribution you like and build KVMs (or xen/vmware/virtualbox, whatever you like) with trial versions on redhat 8 OS image and practice there. Evaluation copies of RHEL 8 for the purpose of exam practice is acceptable, just don't put them in production and understand that there is no support/updates for them. Also it means managing them is so much easier when you mess something up. Just spin up another VM

Thanks all for the information. Based on a few articles and what not, I think I've settled on the Mint distro. I've found a lot of videos that will help with the install. I'll complete it this weekend and report on how it goes. Again, thanks for the information.

yes, Mint is a very well rounded distro to start with, and would give you exposure to debian(and derivatives) administration as well.

To add to what rtmistler stated: this is because there are typically very few end user applications in the CentOS repositories, especially related to multimedia and home desktop use. You can certainly make CentOS an end user desktop but it requires the addition of third party package repositories, and this may or may not cause security issues because you have to trust these repositories. Most are probably fine but it is far easier to do as others suggested and just use a distribution designed for desktop use in the first place.