I try my best to not pass judgement on the various distributions of Linux – but CentOS always ends up rubbing me wrong.

For instance, why does it need 10%+ more RAM than everything else- just to sit and idle? What’s so magical if you are running the same stuff? It’s not like one is compiled with gcc, and the other clang, or major differences in libc, et al..

Today, I was able to witness the joy of a simple qemu grab pulling in GlusterFS, cups, and several other unimportant tools- ballooning this to a 300MB install. Guess what it missed? The BIOS. Yep.. I had to grab seabios separately, but at least I have full CUPS support already.

I can understand that people who are used to RedHat and know this as their native distribution- but it’s just so piggy. I do not see it as useful as stripped distributions for people who are trying to get the most of their hardware- but since when has Enterprise ever been about that?