juanito wrote:I'm not sure there's such a big difference between distros except in how the window manager displays/hides things...
That would be normally true - except this is Red Hat Enterprise.
What this means is that RHEL is about three releases behind current Fedora. If you load the latest version of CentOS and the latest version of Fedora, and compare them, it's almost like using two different operating systems.
As an example, the current version of Fedora no longer uses the same Add/Remove Programs panel. If you are used to the YDL panel, you'll have to mentally switch gears, and re-learn the software. And, that's what the original post was about - "How can I keep my YDL skills honed?" CentOS - or any of the other RHEL derivatives - is the best fit.
Also - the older libraries present an interesting challenge. That's the whole "yum-protectbase" thing. That's not unique to YDL at all - it was originally invented by the CentOS team, and adopted by the RHEL/Fedora teams. You don't run into library issues with Ubuntu or Fedora, if you stay fully current.
For me, there's certain "power user" muscles that get exercised with the Enterprise Linuxes that you don't run into with the public Linuxes. I've had similar experiences with SuSE Enterprise as well.
Cheers,
Paul