Last year, we saw many people who migrated to CentOS. There is no doubt we have many more CentOS “newcomers” this year. There are basically two types of CentOS newbies.

One is former/current Windows users who just want to see what Linux looks like or who are seriously considering saying goodbye to the blasted OS. These people need a lot of help but, as far as they are eager to learn, it’s not difficult to provide assistance.

The other type is those who have been using other distros for some time. They tend to demand the latest and the greatest version of everything. It is often necessary to explain all about an enterprise-class distro, stability and backporting. A recent post in the CentOS forum is from a person of such type:

“I guess I will go with a more updated and modern O/S.
Centos must be years behind other O/S”

Another concept that is often not so obvious among the CentOS newcomers is the package-based management. As soon as they find out their favorite application is not available or obsolete, they want to install it from source. Let me pull some example again from a recent post in the forums (with a slight adjustment):

“I was thinking removing the original version (e.g. yum remove glibc) and install the new version using /usr/local as the root path could be a better solution for the system stability.”

This poster is even talking about the stability ! However, this is not a laughing matter. We should all get busy and provide proper guidance to people who are serious about doing the migration.

Welcome to the CentOS community !