When comparing Crouton & Kali Linux vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends Crouton & Kali Linux for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for beginners?” Crouton & Kali Linux is ranked 30th while CentOS is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Crouton & Kali Linux is:
This method will keep your chrome operating system installed; so you can use both on your device.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Keeps Chrome operating system
This method will keep your chrome operating system installed; so you can use both on your device.
Pro Will not void warranty
This is a software method, no hardware will have to be modified, so your warranty will stay intact.
Pro Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.
Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.
This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Good long term support
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
Pro Supports multiple PHP versions
You can install multiple PHP versions and have them available for different users.
Pro Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
Cons
Con Developer Mode
In doing this method, you will have to put your chrome book in developer mode, while not a huge downside, some security considerations will have to be given to that fact. Developer mode on most chrome books are insecure by design.
Con Ram usage
Due to the nature of Chroots (what Crouton does) you will be running both Chrome OS and your Linux operating system of choice at the same time. On lower end chrome books this may cause issues with RAM usage.