Yeah we have two CentOS 4 boxes. They aren't connected to the internet just an old fashioned DUP to receive and send text from a client's mainframe and wrap it in a SOAP request and post to an internal host on an internal LAN. One of them had an uptime of 6 years until our UPS blew up.
Have you tried recently? The first few versions of Unity were awful - but I tried again (Trusty, 14.4), and whoa - realized I like it better than the Mac and Gnome2 I'm still using occasionally.
It took a while to take off, and I still meet the occasional bug - but it's extremely usable right now. YMMV.
Yeah, once you turn off the internet search crap, Ubuntu is pretty comfortably the least terrible desktop Linux distro.
I simply don't have the time these days to configure X and everything from scratch, and Ubuntu mostly manages to take care of that for me. Then it gives you a desktop environment which looks a lot like my OS X setup, and is perfectly fine at doing basic things.
Yeah we have two CentOS 4 boxes. They aren't connected to the internet just an old fashioned DUP to receive and send text from a client's mainframe and wrap it in a SOAP request and post to an internal host on an internal LAN. One of them had an uptime of 6 years until our UPS blew up.