When comparing Android-x86 vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends CentOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” CentOS is ranked 48th while Android-x86 is ranked 82nd. The most important reason people chose CentOS is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro It's a complete port of Android to x86
Pro Has Bluetooth & WiFi support
Pro Stable device support
Runs on more devices than any other available Android on a PC product presently available, KitKat, Lollipop, all open source.
Pro Actively developed
Since 2009 the pet project of running Android on a PC by a highly respected developer, has gathered many developer contributions from the open source community...and in 2015 they are still going strong and delivering. Contributors are welcomed and needed for ongoing development work, any donations are accepted.
Pro Open source
Using Open Source Mesa for GPU / Video and presently up to Linux Kernel 4.0.6, with some Kernel 4.1 test builds available from contributors....
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 Slow performance
Runs very slow which is not efficient.
Con Short list of supported devices
Currently it's tested on only the following devices:
- ASUS Eee PCs/Laptops
- Viewsonic Viewpad 10
- Dell Inspiron Mini Duo
- Samsung Q1U
- Viliv S5
- Lenovo ThinkPad x61 Tablet
Check them out, download a build and try it for yourself, read their forums and see what is presently happening, from the SurfacePRO 3 work in progress to the older Asus T100 ongoing work and many other PC's, Laptop, 2-in-1's, the older Surface 2, Dell XPS 12, Dell Venue 8, HP Stream, Sony Viao and many others. AOSP KitKat is their present released product, Lollipop version 5.1.1 is their present development cycle. There are builds available for either.