[nametoremember]

The repositories are awesome. Especially for programming and stuff.

But.. I hate when I want a beta version of some software and it's not in the repositories. Then it's a bit annoying.

I think a mix of the Windows way and repositories would be the best for the average user.

[eof]

Yeah; it's a pain, but centos deals with it really well. There are 3rd party repos you can add which specialize in certain software, so you can always have cutting edge lamp stack stuff, for example, updated with yum.

Takes a minor bit of configuration to set up, but once you do it's as transparently beautiful as out-of-the-box yum installing.