CentOS Linux is a Linux distribution is an enterprise OS platform compatible with its source RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Its end of life was announced for December 2021.
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Microsoft Windows
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Windows is an operating system with editions to support business workstations.
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Pricing
CentOS Linux
Microsoft Windows
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CentOS Linux
Microsoft Windows
Free Trial
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Free/Freemium Version
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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No setup fee
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CentOS Linux
Microsoft Windows
Considered Both Products
CentOS Linux
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Microsoft Windows
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Director
Chose Microsoft Windows
Because of its compatibility with third-party software requirements.
In any role where you need raw server power, CentOS Linux is extremely well suited. It is extremely stable, and in my experience, probably the most stable of the Linux distros available. It has a very wide base of support from 3rd party sources for additional functionality that do not come already in the CentOS Linux distribution itself. It is not as appropriate for situations that are customer facing or end user facing. For those, I recommend Ubuntu Linux. But for everything server & compute related, I recommend CentOS Linux.
It is well suited in a work environment, being that an organization can set up their system to be specifically work related and only certain users can get access is really helpful. I also like that multiple users can log in on the same device and keep each account seperate without interfering with the other.
Again, written documentation is excellent, even on the older versions. The support community is the best. It is comprehensive and I would say that it global because it transcends national boundaries. Also, you find all types of people using CentOS to do all sorts of things so you are bound to find someone to talk to if there are problems.
CentOS is based on RHEL, so it really came down to the costs when making the selection between our options. RHEL offered more support and features, but nothing that we specifically needed. CentOS is fully customizable, something Windows Server was also lacking in many ways. The stability and speed was unmatched in comparison to Windows, and we were not utilizing any Windows-specific software to require us to use the Microsoft alternative. My years of experience have also made it a breeze to set up and configure new CentOS instances, leading me to stay where I'm comfortable.
CentOS's support of RPM packages makes it very easy to replicate RHEL servers for development or testing in cheap / free environments
CentOS's minimalistic desktop environment requires additional tweaking / packages if you want to have a usable desktop environment with the niceties of other modern distributions. As a result, if developers want to use CentOS, they'll need to spend more time customizing it than other distros.
CentOS's easy customization from the command line lends itself well to our virtualization infrastructure where setup can be easily scripted to modify CentOS's configuration files.