In case you hadn't heard (and count me among that number until just about now), CentOS 7 is out.

One of the things that CentOS is planning to do in its cozy-with-Red Hat present and future is release a whole lot of specialized images.

One of those images is out right now. It's an "Everything" ISO image that fits on an 8 GB flash drive and offers every package in CentOS 7.

This is what that README file says about the "Everything" image:

This image contains the complete set of packages for CentOS 7. It can be used for installing or populating a local mirror. This image needs a dual layer DVD or an 8GB USB flash drive.

That README details the rest of the images available of CentOS 7, including the DVD-sized and minimal ISO images.

Want to download CentOS 7? Start here.

And for those who want to run CentOS 7 on the desktop with minimal pain, take heart: Nux is prepping a CentOS 7 version of Stella

The title of this post is long. It says it all.

I'd like easy file-encryption from the file manager in Fedora (and every other version of Linux, for that matter).

I'd prefer that encryption be strictly password-based and not dependent on encrypted keys that I might lose, but encryption with keys that I have safely backed up offsite is better than no encryption at all, so I'm going to try using the GNOME application Seahorse to try this out.

I'll even ignore that I'm not using GNOME and instead relying on the Thunar file manager in Xfce.

But I do have a full GNOME environment installed, and I'd use it more if GNOME would run under the AMD Catalyst driver in Fedora 20. That it does not should be a much bigger deal than it appears to be among the greater Linux user base.

Anyway, I do have Nautilus, and to make Seahorse work in that file manager, Fedora offers the seahorse-nautilus package. I installed it just now and will be giving it a try in the very near future.

Update: After installing seahorse-nautilus, it is possible to encrypt files via right-click in Nautilus, but there is no right-click option to decrypt a file.

There is a Fedora 17-era bug on this issue, which appears to have been resolved.

Since the problem seems to be back in Fedora 20, I asked about this on Ask Fedora and was encouraged to file bug, which I did.

An answer on Ask Fedora provided a workaround, but I'm reluctant to try it at this time, though I should probably look into it for help in creating a "custom action" in Thunar so I can encrypt/decrypt directly from my chosen Linux file manager.

I see in the Fedora Magazine that Matthew Miller is the new Fedora Project Leader.

Terrific choice.

Watch the video above, read his Fedora Magazine posts.

I'm very confident about Fedora being in good hands as the Fedora.Next project begins remaking what the distribution is for those who both use and produce it.

That Fedora is stretching its own particular envelope and remaking itself for the desktop, server and cloud is huge. And having Matt -- a longtime Fedora contributor -- at the helm is very reassuring indeed.

In looking to replace Fedora and get out of Catalyst hell, the distribution I choose depends on whether I will continue to dual-boot with Windows 8 (which I almost never use) or swap in my 320 GB drive and single-boot Linux.

Now that my hardware is "maturing," I can start considering distributions that aren't as aggressive as Fedora in terms of their updates.

Bleeding edge isn't something I'm looking for.

I'm leaning toward continuing with Xfce, though I will consider the GNOME and LXDE desktops. I'm even considering Ubuntu's Unity.

Musts

• Packaged audio/video codecs and AMD Catalyst/fglrx
• Lots of desktop packages in the repository, including the OpenShot video editor
• A decent period of support (would prefer LTS length at this point)

Linux Mint is conspicuously absent from my list. Maybe I should consider it.

The recent move to continue supporting Debian Squeeze as an LTS, and the expectation that the same will happen for current and future releases, has me looking more closely at Debian than I otherwise might. I have a lot of fondness for Debian. For one reason or other it generally runs "faster" than just about anything else.

But as "bleeding edge" as Fedora is, I probably had to do more hacking/scripting to get things working the way I wanted in Debian Squeeze/Wheezy than in Fedora 18/19/20, Fedora's Catalyst driver fiasco excluded, so that's something to think about.

My daughter's aging IBM Thinkpad R32 laptop runs Lubuntu, and I'm fairly impressed by it.

But Xfce remains my workhorse DE. Especially when it comes to running my company's proprietary CMS over Citrix, Xfce seems to play "better" with this sorry arrangement than other DEs. In Xfce I have to be "disciplined" enough to stay on a single virtual desktop. Changing desktops cuts my Citrix connection and locks me out of my apps. (Thanks, Citrix ... or thanks, CMS vendor who will not be named).

In GNOME 3, changing windows at all cuts the connection, so I need to keep Xfce around for this reason alone. I haven't tested this behavior in Unity because I can bring GNOME onto my Fedora system, but Unity is Ubuntu-only, and I haven't set up a full Ubuntu system with Citrix and done a test with this particular CMS. (That's the trouble with a desktop environment tied to a single distro.)

Top candidates, in no particular order, (with notes) are:

• Debian Wheezy (doesn't handle UEFI, but won't change too much -- good if it works)
• Debian Jessie (SystemD integration pending, chaos could ensue before freeze)
• Xubuntu (very few negatives, handling of PulseAudio volume from panel is superior to other Xfce systems)
• Ubuntu (Might be time to sample Unity)
• Ubuntu GNOME (I'm back and forth on GNOME 3, more forth than back these days)
• Lubuntu (I like it, but can LXDE measure up to Xfce?)

Fedora 21 won't be released until October, and if my AMD Catalyst solution continues to hold up, there's a very, very good chance I'll stick with Fedora 20 until the whole thing falls apart.