Make sure to give Linux lots of time to finish booting just in case this is happening to CentOS as well. As a result, USB 2.0 peripherals will work with USB 3.0 ports, but they will run at the maximum speed that USB 2.0 provides rather than the faster. The server model retains its 999 price tag. USB 3.0 is backwards compatible with USB 2.0. The 2011 Mac Mini in fact adopts the old pricing model as before the 2010 update, the Minis were priced 599 and 799 respectively. Wireless Internet access requires a base station or other wireless access point and Internet access fees may apply.
Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. This is due to the Apple hardware/firmware behavior which is very poor. However, the 'Mid-2011' Mac mini models have four USB 2.0 ports and the 'Late 2012' Mac mini models have four significantly faster USB 3.0 ports. Mac mini achieved a Gold rating from EPEAT in the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, and the UK. I know when booting Knoppix Linux on a Mac that the Mac appears to be frozen on the boot picker menu and/or a black screen until Knoppix reaches the Desktop. I know a co-worker has been installing Linux Mint on our organization's old Apple laptops for years because it just works. If you want to use Linux on a Mac, then I suggest using Linux Mint or one of the Ubuntu flavors such as Kubuntu or Ubuntu-MATE as they should just work on a Mac. The high-end standard 'Late 2012' model - the Mac mini 'Core i7' 2.3 (Late 2012)- provides a massively faster quad core processor, a faster architecture, faster RAM, a larger hard drive, and faster USB 3.0 ports, but slower graphics, than the 'Mid-2011' model replaced - the Mac mini 'Core i5' 2. Early 2011 to mid 2013 Mac systems use first-generation Thunderbolt, which supports DisplayPort 1.1a. I don't recall the specific setting as that was a few years ago. Thunderbolt ports on 2011 or later Mac Systems support Mini DisplayPort, a common technology for connecting external displays. I remember I had to use a special boot parameter to the Linux kernel in order to get some Linux disks to boot on a Mini.
Also I have seen a Mac Mini have boot issues which was due to the video driver and/or video configuration in the Linux installer. This Model can be differentiated from its predecessors by the lack of the optical drive opening in the front of the device and by the thunderbolt. Apple promised '2x faster everything' for this Mac mini.
I've never used CentOS so I'm not sure how it behaves on a Mac, but it would not be my choice to use on a Mac since Macs do require special configuration of drivers that may not be included in CentOS by default. A year after its release, the A1347 Mac mini was updated to include a thunderbolt port, Core i5 or i7 processors, and one less optical drive. MacOS does not play well with Linux so it is not unusual for the macOS Startup Disk System Preference not to recognize a non-Apple OS boot disk.