>> RedHat is pay to use.. that is what separates it :p
> I have CentOS on my dell netbook, 1G ram, tiny dual core Atom processor. Works fine,...
Well, yeah, RedHat is pay to play, but it spawned the free Fedora and CentOS derivatives, so considering them...
I used RedHat (7.1) as my work desktop on an engineering workstation starting in 2002, then Fedora Core 4 as my desktop at work and at home from about 2004 until the present, and added CentOS (which I'd used as a server OS since 2007) about a year ago. CentOS is now my primary personal desktop at work.
In short, CentOS is an awesomely productive personal desktop environment. I get tons of things done in it, every day. More stable than Fedora, by the way, which matters. And at work I'm surrounded by Ubuntu machines, which are good, but don't seem to have the crisp clarity of CentOS. The guys who were using Ubuntu switched to Windows 7; more productive for them. Okay.
I guess some of it is that I'm grossed out when a perfectly good desktop design gets screwed with so as to look like another one. It seems like everybody -- the sleeker Linux distros and Windows Vista/7/8 at least -- is trying to look like Mac OS X.
That's kind of a shame... even though I like OS X a lot, there are lots of ways to skin a cat, OS X being only one of them, and it has its flaws. I'm using OS X at the moment to FReep tonight... and it pains me to see other perfectly good OSes ape-ing it, and not doing as well.
And all the above is to be taken merely as MHO, YMMV and probably will.
Great summarization ;) and, btw (hated Fortran and Cobald >.< ... Pascal was much nicer :p)