CentOS

85 engineers on Hacker News describe using CentOS first-hand: 17 endorse it, 12 regret it, 5 are mixed.

57%trust
85first-hand users
72in production
endorse 17mixed 5regret 12uses, no opinion

“So many that we migrated away from it, when they backported a driver bug into centos 5 and then did the same backport of a bug for centos 6.”

regret · production · PunchyHamster · 2026-05-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“after working with it for a few months, I'm absolutely in love.”

endorse · production · Goofy_Coyote · 2024-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“few hundred servers at work where we migrated from CentOS (which was a chore to manage tbh).”

regret · production · ilyt · 2023-07-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL. This allowed to have a homogenous environment”

endorse · production · aeyes · 2023-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“thousands of lines of code in configuration management removed that were just fixes for centos stuff”

regret · production · ilyt · 2023-03-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We're using it for years... we use CentOS on our pets sometimes because it reduces administration load.”

endorse · production · bayindirh · 2022-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“while CentOS just have worked.”

endorse · production · jeltz · 2022-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS exploded just before the last one, so we moved to Ubuntu instead of CentOS 8 which was our original plan.”

regret · production · bombcar · 2022-06-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS Stream's last podman major version update broke 70% of my company's infrastructure, affecting 120+ employees”

regret · production · cue_the_strings · 2022-01-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we left centos for debian because it kept failing after kernel upgrades”

regret · production · tluyben2 · 2021-02-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The one thing I can't get over though, is the decision to roll out this change in the middle of CentOS 8's lifecycle”

regret · production · invokestatic · 2020-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We need every bit of that 10 year life cycle, and we glad that we will probably only have to rebuild these systems 2 or 3 times”

endorse · production · syshum · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS on enterprise hardware is way more stable than Debian. ... we had much less trouble in our systems.”

endorse · production · _x5tx · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Breaking a promise like this is non-trivial, and I have stopped using RedHat as a result.”

regret · personal · strenholme · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS is my choice for stability, if I want to play in the wild world of new hotness I have Arch for that.”

endorse · production · syshum · 2020-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using Cent since 2012 and currently run numerous workloads in production on it. I've shipped SaaS products on top of it”

endorse · production · 8 yr · freedomben · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“stable upgrade paths were always trivial when compared to Centos "nuke and rebuild" approach”

regret · personal · lordgroff · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS impressed me so much in the years I've been using it... We will migrate to another solution for our internal systems and not look back.”

mixed · production · silentsysadmin · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“for personal use CentOS is awesome (I can use all my expertise)”

endorse · personal · freedomben · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“rock stable is Debian / CentOS. There are certainly bugs in the later too, but I never experienced any in 15 years”

endorse · production · 15 yr · jmnicolas · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I like stream. A handful of my side projects are running it now”

endorse · personal · arminiusreturns · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“If you want stability on bare metal servers without having to pay the RedHat license then CentOS is the way to go.”

endorse · production · _x5tx · 2020-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I see more and more customers wanting Red Hat/CentOS than any other Linux distro and for good reason.”

endorse · production · secret_island · 2017-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the system has given me no problems whatsoever on the performance and reliability fronts.”

endorse · production · krylon · 2017-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I used to run CentOS in Dev/Test and then Red Hat in Prod... both CentOS & Red Hat are slow to move, but very stable.”

mixed · production · abrookewood · 2017-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We spent the last year+ running containers on Centos7 with no problems from the OS.”

endorse · production · 1 yr · bitwalker · 2017-02-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“However I end up with CentOS every time when it comes to rolling out something professionally in production.”

endorse · production · batou · 2015-06-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“for some of our older CentOS installs I have to stick w/ 2.6, which is a bit of a pain.”

mixed · production · deckiedan · 2014-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“that server was smoothly running CentOS before I left that company.”

endorse · production · dijit · 2014-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Fedora/CentOS ok but has the 'wrong packet manager'”

mixed · personal · johnsea · 2013-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“so much production software is running on RHEL/Centos systems with 2.6.”

regret · production · darkarmani · 2012-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We switched from CentOS to SL back when CentOS 6 was so late being released; couldn't be happier with it.”

regret · production · SwellJoe · 2012-07-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the staff @ CERN and Fermilab inspire more confidence in their commitment to their distro than the CentOS.”

mixed · production · rdtsc · 2011-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we switched to Ubuntu because the CentOS repos were getting rather stale.”

regret · production · niels_olson · 2010-06-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We migrated to Ubuntu from CentOS as well.”

neutral · production · JoeBOFH · 2026-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we'd switched from CENTOS to Red Hat which returned totally different v8 time strings from the underlying calls”

neutral · production · wincy · 2026-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Every VM ran CentOS, and every one of them hit the default CentOS ntp servers.”

neutral · production · raffraffraff · 2024-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I still have CentOS6 machines in prod...”

neutral · production · rollcat · 2024-02-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“5 years later, we moved to minimal centos7.”

neutral · production · 120bits · 2023-09-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Pre-Stream CentOS was never my preference, but I did spend some time running it to learn the RHEL way.”

neutral · personal · doubled112 · 2023-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use multitude of OS versions ranging from CentOS, to Debian including FreeBSD and Solaris so what do you want?”

neutral · production · doublerabbit · 2022-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“this was always CentOS in production environments that used a really old kernel and never a modern kernel.”

neutral · production · LinuxBender · 2022-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Linux VMs in Azure were either RHEL or CentOS. Since the scrapping of CentOS we've switched to Ubuntu LTS”

neutral · production · frameset · 2022-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The only use I have for CentOS is to compile Ventoy”

neutral · personal · csdvrx · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Lots of CentOS, most now looking at Rocky and Alma.”

neutral · production · doubled112 · 2021-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have a single server in my home running CentOS 7.”

neutral · personal · awill · 2021-01-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using CentOS for at least a decade and only learned today that it was short for Community Enterprise OS.”

neutral · personal · 10 yr · morvita · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“our users can run their ML/DL loads relatively effortlessly on CentOS for some time.”

neutral · production · jabl · 2020-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use CantOS in production. Our servers are typically replaced once in 3 years.”

neutral · production · sumanthvepa · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Now I run CentOS in production for a small web app.”

neutral · production · ehayes · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We run CentOS for non-critical stuff and RHEL for stuff that really needs support.”

neutral · production · Yeroc · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we use CentOS at work because it's free (as in beer)”

neutral · production · jmnicolas · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We only need RH equal of Debian, since the software we use generally have explicit CentOS/RHEL support.”

neutral · production · bayindirh · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I use CentOS for personal stuff all time.”

neutral · personal · freedomben · 2020-04-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“running systemd in production over 4 years on CentOS 7.”

neutral · production · 4 yr · m0xte · 2019-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The docker deamon and container simply hanged because of filesystem issues on CentOS 6.”

neutral · production · user5994461 · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using CentOS and Ubuntu Server to run my webservers for around twelve years now, which includes a top-1000 website in the US.”

neutral · production · 12 yr · Zarel · 2018-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like.”

neutral · production · reacharavindh · 2018-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Today we email about 2,000,000 opt-in emails per day from the same DO $5 512MB box, built on Centos 6 and postfix.”

neutral · production · joering2 · 2018-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it was twice as fast as the optimised MySQL installation out of the box with a stock CentOS6 kernel.”

neutral · production · dijit · 2018-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS 6/7, NFS v3/v4, tuned every setting I could think of”

neutral · production · leesalminen · 2017-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“CentOS 7 Vagrant VM on my Mac”

neutral · personal · kimi · 2017-09-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“most servers we run for dev and test purposes are Linux, often CentOS.”

neutral · production · johan_larson · 2017-06-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“As mentioned we use Jboss, and we run it on CentOS.”

neutral · production · eksemplar · 2017-05-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It's possible I updated that Perl script when we moved to CentOS in the early 2000's”

neutral · production · bigiain · 2017-01-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We run Kafka (and I believe Cassandra) on top of Centos/ZFS in AWS”

neutral · production · vlahmot · 2016-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“osnlb - Load balancer for the master (CentOS 7)”

neutral · production · snuxoll · 2016-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we run redis and elastic search on CentOS”

neutral · production · sklivvz1971 · 2016-05-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Openssl/OpenSSH is now up to date according to the CentOS repo, which has backported patches for exploits mentioned.”

neutral · production · mediacatch · 2015-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We have a shitload of servers running CentOS for historical reasons.”

neutral · production · fu86 · 2015-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“almost fully converted from Scientific Linux 6 to CentOS 7 (only the NFS boxes left!)”

neutral · production · nathwill · 2015-05-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“But now I'm suffering from a year old docker bug on centos, and it's more of a pain than if i wasn't using it.”

neutral · production · dholowiski · 2014-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“It's running stable (compiled under CentOS7)”

neutral · production · q_no · 2014-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it actually works really well on all the servers I've moved to CentOS 7”

neutral · production · stephen_g · 2014-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use CentOS for all our linux systems and are deploying new servers on CentOS 7 now.”

neutral · production · Nick-Craver · 2014-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I had the fortunate pleasure of fixing a package on CentOS.”

neutral · personal · agentultra · 2013-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My company uses CentOS, and back in the days of the transition to v6, CentOS was delayed.”

neutral · production · sergiosgc · 2013-07-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we run CentOS on our servers and even trying out the software on that distro is quite difficult.”

neutral · production · mbreese · 2012-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“zfsonlinux.org has been reliable for me on a CentOS 6 dev box.”

neutral · personal · bsg75 · 2012-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I maintain a system which consists of about 30 CentOS servers; not large by any means.”

neutral · production · alanctgardner2 · 2012-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“which we've been hosting for years on Linux, initially on CentOS”

neutral · production · mythz · 2012-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Centos is installed and configured with puppet.”

neutral · production · 3 yr · Deadsunrise · 2012-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At my day job, we run CentOS 5 on EC2 instead of Amazon Linux”

neutral · production · jeramey · 2011-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“maintain the rails-based infrastructure, in both Debian and CentOS, the distributions that we use.”

neutral · production · zppx · 2010-12-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Running on CentOS”

neutral · production · scorchin · 2010-02-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?