CentOS question

[Woodzman]

Hello, I came across this bit of information from an ebay seller,
who sells linux related software.

Most Linuxes share near the same set of features. However if you learn Linux not merely for fun but in a future job in mind, we strongly advise to go with CentOS Linux because it is Red Hat Linux, just named differently. RD represents overwhelming majority in enterprise installations.

Perhaps someone who has used this distro can offer some
insight here as to why this may be the case ?
If CentOS is a better distro, office wise that would certainly be a plus.
I have found most linux distro's to be a bit of a hassle, regarding connecting office related devices, printers, etc, as
I usually have to get the drivers from source.

How does CentOS fare in this regard? Some objective replies
welcome, and thank you.

[Lazydog]

CentOS is a rebuild of the RedHat SRPM's. In other words they are compiled form the same software and will work the same way.

[Woodzman]

CentOS is a rebuild of the RedHat SRPM's. In other words they are compiled form the same software and will work the same way.

Thank you, I have never used Red Hat, have used Fedora though and didn't see much difference there from other distro's other than the
install process.

[Rubberman]

Fedora is what RH uses to test out new versions of kernels and such. It is not supported for enterprise use, although many try to use it for such. There are a number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones (built from the same TUV sources, but with copyrighted images replaced) such as CentOS (very popular for major enterprise systems - my company uses it extensively, in thousands of servers world-wide), Scientific Linux (maintained by the US Fermi National Laboratory computer division) which is used world-wide by most major scientific laboratories and facilities, and Oracle Linux. My work systems are CentOS and our own company's clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and my home systems (both workstation and laptop) are Scientific Linux. They are all very stable, and perform well both in hardware and virtual machine installations.

All appropriate software and package rpm files will install equally on any of these distributions.