Review: CentOS 10 Stream
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
I think what surprised me the most while working on this evaluation of CentOS was how little I had to explore and discuss. The distribution's release announcement mentions no new additional features, just items being removed (such as older architecture support). Even the list of updated key packages is sparse. The Workstation role is likewise sparse. There are few applications in evidence, no development tools, no container manager, no media support, not even a web browser. Further, there is no graphical web browser in the default repositories and, on a distribution in a family of projects which promote Flatpak as the path into the future, there are no Flatpak repositories enabled.
What surprised me further was the problems I had with the few components which were included. It's been years since I've had stability problems with GNOME and it's rare a distribution locks up or crashes once it has been successfully installed. Yet, with CentOS, both of these issues occurred.
The single highlight of my time with CentOS was Cockpit. Though I'd intended to focus on using the distribution as a development workstation, even in the Workstation role, the distribution functioned better as a server managed remotely.
CentOS 10 Stream is further evidence, in case anyone was still lingering in doubt, that Red Hat is not interested in the desktop or developer workstations. CentOS 10 is pushing more and more toward being a minimal, server platform exclusively. In this space it is doing okay, but it's not doing anything which makes it stand out compared to Debian, Ubuntu, or openSUSE Leap. It doesn't have openSUSE's YaST, it doesn't take advantage of an advanced filesystem like Btrfs, and it doesn't have Ubuntu's massive repositories. It feels like an abandoned project, still alive, but running out of fuel.
I've mentioned before that Fedora feels less like a complete operating system and more like a collection of open source parts someone has put in a pile. CentOS feels like this too, but with most of the parts removed.