On Laptops: Thoughts On Using CentOS, Ubuntu LTS, and Fedora


I recently participated in a discussion in a CentOS group I belong to about the suitability of CentOS for ordinary laptops. These were my thoughts, mostly taken from various points in the discussion and edited into a coherent whole. Is CentOS really good for laptops? Like so many things it depends on what you intend to do and what software you're going to use.
I use CentOS 8 on several laptops and it mostly works well. It may be missing some drivers you might need. If so, ELRepo is a good source for those. You definitely won't find the number of apps you do in Ubuntu's repositories and will need to go with third party repos. The best of them is EPEL, maintained by the Fedora project. You can leave both ELRepo and EPEL enabled to get updates as needed probably 99.8% of the time. The rare conflict can be avoided by setting repo priorities in dnf to insure official repos have precedence.
If you need to go to third party repos beyond that pull packages manually. Some repos conflict with each other or, on rare occasions, with CentOS packages. If you can stick with EPEL you avoid that.
One thing Ubuntu does that CentOS does not do is automatically download and install proprietary packages required by some hardware. For example, I use an Epson all in one printer/scanner/copier. I had to get drivers and apps directly from Epson's website and install them manually. The good news is that Epson provides rpms for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that work perfectly well with CentOS.
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