Anyone use CentOS 7 as a daily driver? How easy is it to dual boot with windows 10?

[EternalSeeker]

Hello everyone,

 

Hope everyone is doing well! I have been playing with Linux as a hobby and a learning experience for a while now! Even more so thanks to the pandemic. I have been using it in a VM on my laptop (since desktop was out of commission until now). I have used Ubuntu, PopOS, Manjaro, Fedora, OpenSUSE and now CentOS 7. I have gotten used to most of there package management system and the bash commands. I have learning to compile and build from source as well. Recently I have been doing lots of blender rendering, CAD, paraview and running cfd validations, fea and other number crunching things as a learning exercise as well as hobbyist work. Out of all the distro's I got the most performance in rpm based distros. Unfortunately certain commercial software like Ansys only support rhel/centos systems, I have tried installing them in other distro's and doing community workarounds and yet I run into fatal errors during simulation runs. So I decided to stick with CentOS 7. I also upgraded the kernal, adding third party repos, build up to date packages from source or just use precompiled tar files (for scilab, blender and paraview) and use alias and functions to balance dependencies. It all works, even was able to customize it to my liking:

 

So I am tempted to stay with CentOS 7. Now anyone here know how well it will play with newish hardware (like Rampage 5 and a 5960X, and in the future the newer rtx cards)? And has anyone got any experience on how I can turn a vm image into a live cd to just copy over install to another drive? And has anyone got any experience on how I can turn a vm image into a live cd to just copy over install to another drive? Also anyone use steam or gpu passthrough in centOS 7? I would love to try that.

 

Thanks !

 

[Sauron]

CentOS is mainly oriented towards servers and as such it has really old (but stable) packages, which also means you may have problems with new hardware. You're also not using the latest release so this is even more the case. If you like it you should try Fedora which is very similar but uses up to date packages and is intended for desktop use.

[EternalSeeker]

8 hours ago, Sauron said:

CentOS is mainly oriented towards servers and as such it has really old (but stable) packages, which also means you may have problems with new hardware. You're also not using the latest release so this is even more the case. If you like it you should try Fedora which is very similar but uses up to date packages and is intended for desktop use.

Thanks for the the tip, I already tried fedora, but ansys doesn't support it, to much work around and errors. Most commercial grade software just plain work on rhel/centOS. That's is why I am inclined to use CentOS. I have had no issues running latest cmake, scilab, blender and paraview at all. 

 

Have you used CentOS as daily before?

[Sauron]

Just now, EternalSeeker said:

Thanks for the the tip, I already tried fedora, but ansys doesn't support it, to much work around and errors. Most commercial grade software just plain work on rhel/centOS. That's is why I am inclined to use CentOS. I have had no issues running latest cmake, scilab, blender and paraview at all. 

Then at the very least I'd recommend using CentOS 8 and not the much older 7.

1 minute ago, EternalSeeker said:

Have you used CentOS as daily before?

I use it on a server.

[EternalSeeker]

9 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Then at the very least I'd recommend using CentOS 8 and not the much older 7.

I use it on a server.

Hopefully the next release of Ansys supports rhel/centos8. Right now most if not all commercial packages I am learning and using for validation projects seem to just work with centos 7.7 out of the box, centos 8 has the same errors as fedora when I tested.  How easy is it to upgrade between the 2 version? I'll definitely upgrade when they officially support it.

 

Are there any considerations if I am running a nvidia card like a 9 series for cuda? And are there any special considerations based on type of bios the rampage 5 comes with? I already use the semi latest kernel (5.X) on my centos7 vm (which i plan on using for a native install)

[Sauron]

Just now, EternalSeeker said:

How easy is it to upgrade between the 2 version?

Not as easy as I would like but it can be done. Have you considered virtual machines for the packages that don't work natively on 8? KVM is pretty fast and CentOS fully supports it out of the box.

2 minutes ago, EternalSeeker said:

Are there any considerations if I am running a nvidia card like a 9 series for cuda?

Not really, install the nvidia driver and go from there.

2 minutes ago, EternalSeeker said:

And are there any special considerations based on type of bios the rampage 5 comes with?

Not as far as I know.

[Nayr438]

13 hours ago, EternalSeeker said:

Now anyone here know how well it will play with newish hardware (like Rampage 5 and a 5960X, and in the future the newer rtx cards)?

For newish hardware, especially Processors, Fedora or an Arch based distro such as Manjaro will be a much better option.

Distros like Ubuntu and CentOS wait quite awhile between major update cycles, the end result is fairly outdated packages and drivers.

With that said, Ryzen has been out awhile, so long as there is no major changes, it should run fine. If not, you could always check and see if a more recent kernel is in the repos.

For NVIDIA however, I have no idea how nice CentOS will play with that.

 

11 hours ago, Sauron said:

CentOS is mainly oriented towards servers and as such it has really old (but stable) packages, which also means you may have problems with new hardware. You're also not using the latest release so this is even more the case. If you like it you should try Fedora which is very similar but uses up to date packages and is intended for desktop use.

They have actually started moving more to the Desktop scene as of lately, especially with there push of CentOS stream which is a rolling release distro that sits somewhere between Fedora and RedHat. I am not really sure what is going on with them at the moment. https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/

 

Since the introduction of Ubuntu Snaps and there push on server software as appliances, Ubuntu has been quietly replacing CentOS in the server space it seems.

 

The sad thing is most software wont target Fedora due to it's 6 month release cycle, I actually see that reason stated quite often. Mostly with Commercial software. Seems they can't be bothered to keep there applications more up to date, it Makes Centos, RHEL, and Ubuntu LTS the more targeted distros.

Though with CentOS eventually moving to a single rolling release model after Centos 8 EOL, I am not sure how attractive they will be.

 

If anything we might see more commercial software move to snaps, as much as I dislike them in there current state, snaps are supported on most distributions and they can ship what they need with minimal maintenance.

 

3 hours ago, EternalSeeker said:

Thanks for the the tip, I already tried fedora, but ansys doesn't support it, to much work around and errors. Most commercial grade software just plain work on rhel/centOS.

That is indeed a good reason to stick with CentOS so long as you depend on it. I actually don't see anything going by ansys even in the Arch User Repositories  or the snap store as a alternative, unless the software itself goes under another name. However even if it did, you would probably be giving up any possible commercial support.

 

13 hours ago, EternalSeeker said:

Also anyone use steam in centOS 7?

The problem with this will come down to the outdated nature of CentOS 7, while Steam targets Ubuntu and Ubuntu itself is considered rather outdated as is, CentOS actually lags behind Ubuntu. Any improvements from various libraries / packages that steam may depend on, you may miss out on. With that said, I have never attempted to run Steam on CentOS so YMMV. I just wouldn't expect it to be on par with another distro.

[EternalSeeker]

10 hours ago, Sauron said:

Not as easy as I would like but it can be done. Have you considered virtual machines for the packages that don't work natively on 8? KVM is pretty fast and CentOS fully supports it out of the box.

Not really, install the nvidia driver and go from there.

Not as far as I know.

You know that is something I can play around with, no doubt KVM will give better performance then what I am getting in VMWare. However CFD loves all the core's and all the ram, so for the cases I run I have to see if they run okay with only 7 out of the 8 full cores. And okay, since I have most third party repo enabled, installing nvidia driver should be okay. 

 

Thanks for your replies. 

 

7 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

For newish hardware, especially Processors, Fedora or an Arch based distro such as Manjaro will be a much better option.

Distros like Ubuntu and CentOS wait quite awhile between major update cycles, the end result is fairly outdated packages and drivers.

With that said, Ryzen has been out awhile, so long as there is no major changes, it should run fine. If not, you could always check and see if a more recent kernel is in the repos.

For NVIDIA however, I have no idea how nice CentOS will play with that.

 

They have actually started moving more to the Desktop scene as of lately, especially with there push of CentOS stream which is a rolling release distro that sits somewhere between Fedora and RedHat. I am not really sure what is going on with them at the moment. https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/

 

Since the introduction of Ubuntu Snaps and there push on server software as appliances, Ubuntu has been quietly replacing CentOS in the server space it seems.

 

The sad thing is most software wont target Fedora due to it's 6 month release cycle, I actually see that reason stated quite often. Mostly with Commercial software. Seems they can't be bothered to keep there applications more up to date, it Makes Centos, RHEL, and Ubuntu LTS the more targeted distros.

Though with CentOS eventually moving to a single rolling release model after Centos 8 EOL, I am not sure how attractive they will be.

 

If anything we might see more commercial software move to snaps, as much as I dislike them in there current state, snaps are supported on most distributions and they can ship what they need with minimal maintenance.

 

That is indeed a good reason to stick with CentOS so long as you depend on it. I actually don't see anything going by ansys even in the Arch User Repositories  or the snap store as a alternative, unless the software itself goes under another name. However even if it did, you would probably be giving up any possible commercial support.

 

The problem with this will come down to the outdated nature of CentOS 7, while Steam targets Ubuntu and Ubuntu itself is considered rather outdated as is, CentOS actually lags behind Ubuntu. Any improvements from various libraries / packages that steam may depend on, you may miss out on. With that said, I have never attempted to run Steam on CentOS so YMMV. I just wouldn't expect it to be on par with another distro.

I really enjoyed both Fedora and Manjaro, but most of these commercial computing applications are very strict on supported linux OS'es. I do have most of the thirdparty repo enabled and I have been using fedora rpm packages in centOS 7 by using "yum localInstall" and yum fetches all required dependancies from third party repo with up to date libraries. I also have dnf installed too, so depending on the instructions on which to use, all seem to work. I noticed Steam is available on the third party repo's, what performance hits would an older steam client give anyway? (I am going to be dual booting windows anyway so I'll game there). I even got Spotify running fine on CentOS 7 even though officially only ubuntu instructions are shown. So I don't mind the tinkering aspect. 

[Sauron]

46 minutes ago, EternalSeeker said:

I have to see if they run okay with only 7 out of the 8 full cores

You can pass 8 cores to the VM, the kernel will take care of allocating resources as needed. If you only use the VM while you're working you'll get close to 100% performance.

8 hours ago, Nayr438 said:

They have actually started moving more to the Desktop scene as of lately, especially with there push of CentOS stream which is a rolling release distro that sits somewhere between Fedora and RedHat. I am not really sure what is going on with them at the moment. https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/

I guess, but here we're talking about fixed releases like 7 and 8...

[throttlemeister]

Really, is there such a thing as desktop or server oriented? It just depends on the packages you choose to install. Just because something leans towards stability over bleeding edge doesn't make it desktop or server. Debian stable branch is also very much oriented towards stability, but that doesn't make it a server OS. Nor does the bloated, bleeding edge style of Ubuntu make it a desktop OS.

 

Basically you have Fedora, which is a rolling release cimmunity playground that gets turned into the RHEL commercial LTS Linux version every x period of time which gets turned into CentOS as the community derivative of the same RHEL release.

 

Personally I have always been more Debian oriented than RedHat and I would take Debian over Ubuntu or similar any day of the week and twice on Sunday, so I very much get why someone would prefer CentOS over Fedora or Manjaro. And it ain't nothing to do with Server or Desktop. That said, if you need to use commercial, professional software you are typically forced into the RHEL camp as the OP states. But it would be a disservice to the Linux community to label perfectly great distributions as 'Server' when they work equally great on the desktop amd vv. It's just a matter of prefernce and use cases.

[EternalSeeker]

22 hours ago, Sauron said:

You can pass 8 cores to the VM, the kernel will take care of allocating resources as needed. If you only use the VM while you're working you'll get close to 100% performance.

I guess, but here we're talking about fixed releases like 7 and 8...

 

I would love some clarification on that. Say if I use fedora 32 as my host. And I run a centOS KVM, so would the centOS KVM get all the resources when I run an Ansys Simulation (including CUDA)? 

 

18 hours ago, throttlemeister said:

Really, is there such a thing as desktop or server oriented? It just depends on the packages you choose to install. Just because something leans towards stability over bleeding edge doesn't make it desktop or server. Debian stable branch is also very much oriented towards stability, but that doesn't make it a server OS. Nor does the bloated, bleeding edge style of Ubuntu make it a desktop OS.

 

Basically you have Fedora, which is a rolling release cimmunity playground that gets turned into the RHEL commercial LTS Linux version every x period of time which gets turned into CentOS as the community derivative of the same RHEL release.

 

Personally I have always been more Debian oriented than RedHat and I would take Debian over Ubuntu or similar any day of the week and twice on Sunday, so I very much get why someone would prefer CentOS over Fedora or Manjaro. And it ain't nothing to do with Server or Desktop. That said, if you need to use commercial, professional software you are typically forced into the RHEL camp as the OP states. But it would be a disservice to the Linux community to label perfectly great distributions as 'Server' when they work equally great on the desktop amd vv. It's just a matter of prefernce and use cases.

Yeah idk tbh, if Ansys worked on other distro, I would use that tbh. 

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, EternalSeeker said:

I would love some clarification on that. Say if I use fedora 32 as my host. And I run a centOS KVM, so would the centOS KVM get all the resources when I run an Ansys Simulation (including CUDA)? 

It's going to get all the resources that aren't being used by the host system. If you're not doing anything on the host that's close to 100%. If you need CUDA you'll need to check if your motherboard allows vfio passthrough of the graphics card and you'll also need another gpu for your host system.

22 hours ago, throttlemeister said:

Really, is there such a thing as desktop or server oriented?

Yes. Obviously you can use a "server" distro on a desktop and vice versa but its design will reflect its intended purpose. Yes, you can "just install other packages" but you're still limited to what's in the repositories and what is compatible with the rest of the system. A "server" distribution will generally focus on stability rather than pure performance or bleeding edge packages - you can work around that (sometimes) but it's still just that, a workaround rather than a simple native solution. Again, you can make almost anything work, that doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.

[throttlemeister]

On 10/17/2020 at 11:44 AM, Sauron said:

Yes. Obviously you can use a "server" distro on a desktop and vice versa but its design will reflect its intended purpose. Yes, you can "just install other packages" but you're still limited to what's in the repositories and what is compatible with the rest of the system. A "server" distribution will generally focus on stability rather than pure performance or bleeding edge packages - you can work around that (sometimes) but it's still just that, a workaround rather than a simple native solution. Again, you can make almost anything work, that doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.

I am sorry, but as per your qualifications, both Debian and CentOS are server. Please explain to me if I do a standard minimal/net install for both distributions what in those installs qualifies that install to be a server? Or a desktop for that matter? There is nothing on them that lets me use it as either in that state.

 

That whole premise that because a distribution is focused on stability instead of bleeding edge or maximum performance it is either server or desktop oriented is total nonsense. It is just a preference. Some people want to have the latest and greatest with the highest possible performance, other people want to just get work done and not have any downtime because downtime costs more money than a few percent extra performance can make them. Some people build a system with an unlocked i7 or i9 and overclock the snot out of it, others get a prebuild Xeon workstation with ECC memory and same day on-site service. Same thing.

 

There simply is no such thing as a server or desktop OS in Linux-land with workarounds vs native solution for desktop use. That is just plain utter BS. It is not Windows Server, which identifies itself as server causing some client software not to install and which includes server software you cannot get rid of to turn it into a desktop. Sure, you can use Windows Server as a desktop but it is never going to be a desktop os. That is not how Linux works though. Per your logic, you have Debian as a server os, Ubuntu as a hackjob to make a desktop OS from it and now Ubuntu Server as a hackjob of a hackjob to turn it into a server os. And similarly, Fedora is a desktop OS, which gets frozen once or twice a year into commercial RHEL release magically turning it into a server, which then gets spun-off as a community supported CentOS release. It's ridiculous

[Sauron]

48 minutes ago, throttlemeister said:

I am sorry, but as per your qualifications, both Debian and CentOS are server.

Yes.

[ikomrad]

On 10/15/2020 at 12:46 PM, EternalSeeker said:

Thanks for the the tip, I already tried fedora, but ansys doesn't support it, to much work around and errors. Most commercial grade software just plain work on rhel/centOS. That's is why I am inclined to use CentOS. I have had no issues running latest cmake, scilab, blender and paraview at all. 

 

Have you used CentOS as daily before?

I'm in the same situation. Most forums recommend Ubuntu ( or Manjaro/POP!_OS/Mint/etc)  for a desktop OS. But if you want commercial apps to work, many of them ( like the Dell server admin utilities I use daily ) only support RedHat/CentOS.  My last 4 employers all used CentOS as the server OS, though they had a few RH7 installs as well. If your employer uses CentOS , you might want to use it at home as well so that the what you learn at work can be used at home, and vice-versa.

 

I haven't tried CentOS 8, but I plan on installing it today in a VM and start using it to see if it would work out as a desktop OS.