Suggest Virtualization Software for Linux

Yes, there are two main reasons why Centos, First the company I work for is slowing switching from Windows 8.1 to Red Hat Enterprize. They just signed a contract with Red Hat to help maintain their product, and I was the first victim that has to go cold turkey. I anticipate several days of swearing and pulling out my hair, lucky I have a privet office so I shouldn't disturb my fellow coworker too much. Second I am too cheap to pay Red Hats yearly subscription. I will have Red Hat Enterprize on my office computer and Centos on my laptop at home.

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That's an extremely valid reason.

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As I mentioned earlier in this post, the company I work for has made the choice to slowly remove its dependence for the Evil Empire (Microsoft) and switch to a Linux distro. Since I am only middle management I wasn't consulted on which Linux distro to go with. I finally convinced my boss today since it will be my job to get the desktops set up with a Linux distro and to train my fellow coworkers I will be able to choose with one to go with, but there is one caveat it was to be updated very frequently so that leaves out Linux, Ubuntu, or possibly Debian. I don't know enough about Debian to make an informed decision

I don't know about Fedora, I have heard good things and bad. One of its strong points I have heard is if you want to mess around with Virtual Machines or just virtualisation, in general, its the go to Linux distro for that. But I have heard Fedora is not easy to learn and can be very fussy. How often is it update? I might try it in a virtual machine if I ever find a virtualisation software that actually works and not wants to make me scream or pull my hair out. I get very frustrated when software doesn't work like it should, which is one of the reasons I have a privet office.

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I don't remember where I read that, but someone once wrote that he thinks Debian feels like the people working on it "fell asleep behind the wheel" and I can share that opinion. :wink:

A good example is the kernel version, which for the currently newest Debian 8.8 "Jessie" is 3.16.0 while on Fedora you have 4.10.16 at the moment. I never used RHEL before, but from what I have read, I think they aren't updating it as often as Fedora which might be a good or a bad thing, depending on how close you want to be at the "bleeding edge".

Of course any distro is going to have it's high points and low points, and as you pointed out the update cycle is very important, on my Fedora installs (I have three at the moment) I update weekly (normally on Saturday), there are always files/packages on that weekly basis that get updated, I've never seen a week go by that giving the update command returned with a "nothing to do" response.

Some of the users of Fedora find Gnome a problem (it is the default DE) myself included, I installed KDE and it has been fine, I did at one point when Plasma 5 first came out find that it was flaky on 1 of the 3 machines the other 2 were fine. Other people find the lack of pre-installed software a issue, but that is by design (think no bloatware) so the enduser can install the programs they need instead of the distro trying to provide you programs you may not want or need.

As for modern Linux distros IMHO Fedora is on the cutting edge of stability, even though there are kernel updates on a regular basis in 2 years of running it as a daily driver I've never had a issue that was the fault of the build, in fact I have had the Windows 7 VM (KVM) crash because of driver issues and it never ever effected the host system ( I run Win X enterprise in the KVM now).

Also I might mention that I don't boot or reboot very often, instead my PC runs 24-7 and along with the host system the guest system also runs 24-7, there is no drain of resources that you would see in a Windows box doing this type of thing, it just chugs along doing whatever I ask of it. (with the exception of Firefox which is a different issue I have)...

I don't think you could find a more up-to-date distro than Fedora which may or may not be a issue depending on the hardware your putting it on, like all Linux distros new (latest and greatest) hardware takes awhile to be supported but Fedora is also one of the few distros that is constantly moving forward at a good pace, it is actively supported and if a more bleeding edge version is needed there is always their Rawhide spin.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide

Of course this is just my opinion based on my usage, your experiences may be different. :grinning:

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I agree with you about Gnome, I have tried KDE in a virtual machine at work ( I can get a virtual machine to behave its self at work because on my office computer I use VMware to bad it is so expensive) but I could see someone new to Linux would prefer Gnome or Cinnamon. I am not worried about what Desktop GUI to go with just which is easiest for someone new to Linux to learn, and be frequently updated. Red Hat will build us a custom desktop GUI for an addition fee of coarse.

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Aside from the differences in DE's I just don't like Gnome, the level of control over things and the placement of those controls seems counter-intuitive to me, even after installing supplemental Gnome shell extensions and utilities I still find I like KDE better..the one feature of Gnome I really like is how it handles multi-desktops making it very quick to switch between desktops again it's just my opinion.

Fedora is very similar, as far as complexity goes, to CentOS. So as far as ease of use and fussyness, you're going to definitely going to bang your head on the wall sometimes. That said, I'm very experienced in it from a server perspective, so if there's any breaking problems, make a post, tag it as helpdesk and I'll get a notification.

As far as updates go, Fedora is going to be following the latest releases more closely than CentOS for the most part. Fedora is what I'd call "bleeding edge" but still not quite arch.

For the desktop UI, I've found that Cinnamon or Mate are nice, stable, supported solutions. I can't speak to how well they function and are integrated in CentOS, only that they have packages. If you've already got Gnome installed, Cinnamon builds off the base packages of Gnome, so you may want to try that first as you will get less package issues.

Hope this helps!

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Thanks everyone for the help.

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