CentOS Reviews

The solution has many types of use cases. 

The configuration is very good. It is very easy to configure any application, et cetera.

The current version is stable.

The initial implementation is straightforward. 

The product is free to use.

Previous versions were unstable. 

I've been using the solution for close to four years. 

The solution is stable in its current form. This wasn't always the case. In earlier versions, it wasn't as stable as it is now. Currently, there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. However, you do occasionally do still get some unstable packages.

The solution is only really scalable if you handle on-premises versions. However, you can scale it up and down as you need. 

We have close to 300 users using the product right now. 

I've never had to use technical support as everything is pretty straightforward. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

The installation is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company shouldn't have too much trouble handling it. 

The deployment is very quick. It's up and running in a matter of minutes. 

I've always handled the implementations myself. I've never used a consultant or integrator. It's easy to handle in-house. 

This product is free to use. It's great for companies with small budgets.

I have a hybrid setup. On the cloud, I'm using version 7.5. On-premise I'm on 8.3.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. If it was more reliable in terms of dealing with stability, it would be excellent. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users and companies.

We use CentOS in conjunction with our applications and databases.

It's free — it's an open-source solution. It has all the features of Red Hat, but you don't have to pay for the subscription. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same as Red Hat Linux. It uses all of the same repositories, the only difference is that it's open-source.

Integration with other platforms could be improved. There should also be more repositories. There are ways to get data from the repositories, but it could be enhanced.

I have been using CentOS since 2019.

Version 7 is stable — not the recent versions; I believe they have some issues. We are using a stable version as of now. We haven't faced any issues so far.

CentOS is scalable.

I have contacted their support, but it's not commercial technical support. On their website, there are blogs and other users that help. They have a large community that can answer most questions.

Before CentOS, we used Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The reason why we approached CentOS is that it has the same flavor, but there is no subscription. Earlier, we were paying for Red Hat Linux on a yearly subscription. In order to minimize the cost, especially for some of the applications, it didn't make sense to pay on a yearly basis. 

The initial setup is not very straightforward — it's intermediate. Linux is not an easy thing to install. If you don't have the knowledge, it can be a little difficult.

I believe there is a desktop version available that has a UI but we haven't tried it. That might be a little easier to install; but since it's on a server, we needed to use the command prompt.

We installed it ourselves.

There is no price or licensing required — it's open-source. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. 

I would definitely recommend this solution to others. Not the desktop version — I don't have experience with it. On a server level, I would definitely recommend it.

This solution is a very robust operating system, particularly when compared to Windows. It's informative and easy to work with and there's no extra cost involved in installation which reduces our overheads. The monitoring is good. 

I think the GUI could be merged and expansion simplified; both those things would be an improvement. Upgrading servers could be simplified because increasing the hard disk is quite complex.

I've been using this solution for close to 12 years. 

This is a solid solution. 

The solution is scalable and flexible. Even after installing CentOS, it can be expanded.  

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

I recommend CentOS 8 if you're okay with the command line then there's no better option and it's open source. 

I rate this product a seven out of 10. 

We are using this solution as an operating system for scientific computing.

The most valuable feature is performance.

The solution might be discontinued but I hope that IBM will continue to develop it and improve on the functionally and features.

I have been using this solution for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

We have more than 20 customers that use this solution scientific computing.

The installation easy and takes approximately 20 minutes.

We did the implementation ourselves and we have a team of seven engineers that do the implementation and maintenance. 

There is no license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate CentOS a nine out of ten.

The solution provides useful information and has good compatibility. 

I'd like to see additional security and more coding tools. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This solution is stable. 

This solution is scalable, we have around 30 users. 

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I believe it was straightforward. We have infrastructure related employees who dealt with the deployment. 

I recommend this solution and rate it nine out of 10. 

We just see it as an operating system to run our applications. We're in the media industry and we make a lot of TV programs and OTT items. We have developed backend applications that make, let's say, 10 locations happen or make OTT happen.

Everything is running on CentOS due to the fact that it's lightweight. It's not a huge overhead. It's not like Windows eating up a lot of CPU resources. 

The performance in the past, the open-source approach, has been great. 

It helps us with our internal applications for very low pricing.

All our applications internally have been running on CentOS since 2006 when I joined the company so we have been developing on things like that.

We use the solution due to the fact that it's a lightweight, powerful, stable OS. It's being used for a lot of different use cases. 

The stability is very good.

The pricing is good. We pay a minimal fee.

Often, the solution doesn't scale as you expect.

I cannot recall if there are features that need improvement or if there's anything that should be added.

For me, it just has to perform and carry our application. I don't really care about how the user interface looks like as we don't use the user interface. We have an application running on it and that needs to be stable and that's the only thing. Therefore, we have no issues with the solution and don't feel it's missing anything.

The solution is stable, however, it could always be even more stable if possible.

CentOS recently announced some changes. I'm not sure what they will be, however, we look forward to seeing what they come out with. 

I've been using the solution for about ten to 12 years or so. It's been a very long time.

The solution is very stable. The reason that we have standardized the usage of CentOS is the stability. It has proven to us to be very stable compared to other options. 

I'm running around 1,400 CentOS VMs at the moment.

In terms of scalability, of course, things don't scale always as you want, however, it's a powerful solution.

The Dutch organization where I work has eight people on the payroll, however, we are not the users. We are the people building the backend and we have hundreds of thousands of people using the applications running on the data center. The people that watch OTT or watch television make use of parts of the installation.

I'm not on the operational side of the business and therefore have never been in touch with technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are.

We are using Ubuntu, CentOS, and also Red Hat. It really depends on the applications. If we buy applications or we use applications from vendors, if they say it has to run on Red Hat we'll run Red Hat. If they say it better runs on CentOS, it will run on CentOS. We have all the different file systems as we run applications that we buy or rent from vendors that make the applications.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. We have been using it for a long time it's an automatic deployment and has templates. People just have to click on the template being installed in the background. It's an automated process in VMware.

The end-user can go to the portal and they can just select which type of machine they want to have and which CentOS release is being deployed. It's a matter of minutes until they can log in.

A company really doesn't need outside assistance. It's fairly automated and simple to manage. 

The pricing is very reasonable. From what I understand, we pay a minimal fee, if we pay anything at all.

We use different versions of the solution. It's a mixture depending on the application. Some applications are not upgraded by vendors and therefore we are using old versions. We try to stay with our own applications on the latest and greatest, however, generally, it's a mixture.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

It can be used for setting up virtual spaces and the development environment. We have CentOS VPS.

The user access level is most valuable. When you do administration with CentOS, the number of customizations that you can do for each user is higher than other solutions. It is very customizable.

Its memory consumption is much lower than any other OS.

The YUM install manager can be improved. It is below average as compared to the other install managers. This is the only major problem that I see with CentOS. They should reduce dependency on the YUM manager.

They can improve the help for features. It has so many features, but there is no help. They should provide more information and tutorials. Currently, because of the lack of knowledge or availability of resources, features are getting underutilized.

I have been using CentOS for around two years.

It is quite stable.

It is one of the top-notch products in terms of scalability. For scalability, many premium features are available.

Currently, we have around 12 to 15 users. We have plans to increase its usage.

We don't have much experience with their technical support.

Its installation was quite straightforward. There is not much in terms of the setup cost. It was quite straightforward, and it happened quite quickly. From scratch, it took around one and a half hours.

I installed it myself. For its deployment and maintenance, we don't have any technical team. We are able to manage with less than one person per month. We have a manager who manages it.

It is open-source, which means it is a free product. It has a one-time deployment cost.

I evaluated Red Hat.

I would recommend this solution to others. I would rate CentOS a nine out of ten.

Most of the time, I use CentOS for deploying Tomcat to run web applications. I use it to run Docker, as well.

The most valuable feature is that it is compatible with RedHat. 

In the future, CentOS will no longer be compatible with Red Hat. I would prefer that it remains compatible because when it changes, we will no longer be using it.

What is missing from this product is a real file system like CFS. Having a modern file system is important and in CentOS 7, btrfs was supported. However, in version 8 it has been removed. I don't understand why and I think that it was a very bad move and a very customer-unfriendly thing to do.

I have been working with CentOS for a few years.

CentOS is quite stable.

In the company, we have approximately 800 people who are using it. Beyond that, a lot of our customers are using it, as well.

I have never been in contact with technical support. We manage it ourselves.

For as long as I have been with the company, they have been using CentOS.

The installation is mostly straightforward. We have automated it.

There are no licensing costs for CentOS.

At this point, because of the announcement that it will no longer be compatible with Red Hat in the future, I do not recommend this product.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

We use CentOS whenever we can to help bridge services or to add another layer to our infrastructure. We currently use CentOS for monitoring orientated tasks, but it has been our chosen distribution for our enterprise for a few years.

It allows us to freely use and test open-source technologies and solutions. Without it we wouldn't have a server monitoring system, log management system, or many other services that we depend on.

It has minimal updates compared to other distributions. We like the idea of long-term support. CentOS gives us a peace of mind when it comes to updates. It's also a bonus that most of our vendor supported hardware/software is built with CentOS under the hood, allowing us to stay in the Fedora ecosystem.

You're getting what you expect (a linux distro). The wizard has gotten better through the years, so maybe they could build more options into the wizard. However, we have scripts that we deploy to overcome this.

Three to six years.

I don't believe an update has broken anything in our environment. It's very stable and that's the reason CentOS was chosen.

Yes and no. In regards to the OS itself, there aren't any scalability issues. We have run into issues with other applications but that's not the fault of CentOS, rather, it is the application that would need to be revised.

We've used Ubuntu in the past for various systems and projects, and once in a while, a vendor uses it for their platform. We don't care for the more aggressive updates, and we usually don't need the most updated packages.

Straightforward. We deploy with the minimal options, and the wizard is very easy to navigate to help install it. We also have a script that we run to make this process much easier.

In-house for anything related to CentOS.

We don't track ROI.

You can pay for the support if you purchase Red Hat. We don't have the need for that just yet, and CentOS satisfies our needs when needed (assuming we can support it in-house).

When it comes to Linux, we've tried the Debian route before. Trying both Debian and Ubuntu, we settled on CentOS once we noticed that the enterprise market was going in that direction. It proved to be a wise choice.

If you had to choose a Linux distribution for enterprise grade stability, then this would be the logical choice. If you want latest features and fast deployment of updates, then you might want to take a look at Ubuntu.

The simplicity of the Desktop & Server platforms and the availability of multiple repositories of apps and tools.

We use CentOS together with Apache for certificate verification. The platform has helped us to keep things simple and yet very secure, allowing us to meet the requirements with surgical precision.

I've found certain issues where I couldn't find any documentation to help me solve them. But I guess it's a case by case situation where popular problems have a lot of chatter about how to resolve, whereas certain problems don't have as much.

Daily use for a little over a year.

None so far.

Didn't have the opportunity to go to a bigger scale, since our business was just starting out.

Haven't had the chance to use it.

No. We started and created our solution around CentOS.Not at all complex. Anybody with basic Linux knowledge can install the server and almost anybody can easily install the desktop and get themselves familiar with it over a week

Not at all complex. Anybody with basic Linux knowledge can install the server and almost anybody can easily install the desktop and get themselves familiar with it over the course of a week.

Nothing.

Ubuntu.

Make sure you've read about the installation steps and best practices for securing the servers once the OS is installed.