Yes, I have CentOS 6 on a Thinkpad x200s with hard drive encryption enabled as my work machine. I find it stable and quite fast. I may leave that machine on CentOS 6 and put 7 on the 'play' laptop.
My point was giving a choice of desktops is a new departure for Red Hat. Remember that they employ, or have employed, a number of the Gnome developers, and that I gather Red Hat has been a major sponsor of Gnome in the past.
>> giving a choice of desktops is a new departure for Red Hat
Is it? I've only used RHEL on servers but I've used CentOS on my desktops and laptops for a long time with many re-installs - I've always seen the choice to use KDE as part of the base install.
Yeah, coming from the RH/Fedora world, it seemed weird when other distros starting spinning specialized versions for a different window manager on the desktop, such as kubuntu. I guess that's because they wanted to have more control over the "experience". RHEL is about getting shit done when you know what you are doing, not holding your hand and making you feel comfortable, so I guess with those different expectations it's a bit easier.
Did they always? I remember it usually being as simple as installing the RPMs, and running the switchdesk utility. I always had to do that (or generally something more involved because of my choice) to run FVWM2.
Ubuntu also allows you to just install the packages for a different desktop; the differently branded install CDs are mostly for people who come from windows or OSX and thus believe that the desktop == the OS and it's impossible to change once installed :P
I've tended to associate CentOS with Gnome, and I installed from live CD with a reduced package set. I still think it is significant that Red Hat are publicising the choices.
Yeah - Gnome was definitely the subtle default. IIRC correctly, the Gnome option is called "Desktop", and the KDE option was called "KDE" (or something like this). So unless you had a known preference, you'd end up with Gnome. Contrast this with openSuSE that has 2 specifically-named download options.
For me, it's the only Linux desktop which I can find which is reliable and works out of the box with all my hardware.