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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

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Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#51

Post by happyjack »

Wow. I kind of new this day was coming. I work in engineering / science (not comp. sci or developing) and all our software vendors are Windows or RHEL support only. Although if you know your way around linux any flavor will do, but RHEL is the "standard" for support. It's kind of like "insurance." We expect this to compile / work for RHEL and NOTHING else, because RHEL is stable, predictable, and boring.

I've run most all the flavors of linux and am on the Ubuntu train. Actually, I flirted with the RHEL / Fedora / CentOS workflows as current as last year for a few months. I love the predictability and stability of RHEL on workstations and the thought of something new on a laptop or what not. While I respect the hell out of RH and their products, it just didn't work for me. Fedora is WAY too experimental, lacks supports, and is prone to your system breaking. I know, I know, it is pretty stable and has a lot of support behind it. But after updating via yum and having my WIFI stop working on my 6 year old Thinkpad, that is a deal breaker. I think there is way too much disconnect between their projects. RHEL is super stable, but the packages are severely outdated. Fedora is too experimental, and is pretty much a home operating system and a playground. I know CentOS is free, but depending on your business is paying $300 / year / machine for legitimate support and ticketing really an issue? That's for everyone to decide on their own. I think Ubuntu LTS is the best middle ground for stability and new packages. And if you need paid support and professional help, you can pay Canonical as well.

I could see this coming. CentOS didn't really show a value proposition for RH picking up the tab and supporting it. CentOS was recompiling RHEL and shipping it off; RH needs to keep their PR and image inline and HAD to help, since the whole point of CentOS was "this is RHEL without RH graphics and copyrighted material." IMO, RH felt like they were doing the same thing twice; producing RHEL, then removing RHEL branding and helping package up and compiling CentOS. Due to this, I think the biz folks scratched their on why they needed money, and now we have Centos Stream. I have no doubt another project will spin up taking up the slack of just recompiling RHEL.

Different tools for different jobs. Maybe Centos Stream will be awesome! Maybe it can fill the gap between Fedora and RHEL.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#52

Post by mrweasel »

derekp7 wrote: post #21
sim-o-lacrum wrote: post #6

I wouldn't be surprised if this means that another project will crop up soon-ish which does what CentOS did before, rebuild RHEL so there is a stable, boring distribution for people who want RHEL without wanting or being able to pay RH.

Maybe Scientific Linux can get revived.

Wasn't CentOS "adopted" by RedHat because no one else really wanted to do the work?

A revived Scientific Linux could easy suffer the same fate. No one truly want to maintain a RedHat clone for little to no pay, while at the same time dealing request and complaints from companies who wants the benefits of RHEL, but no pay for the development and maintenance works done by RedHat.

Realistically it's some bean counter at IBM who asked why RedHat is giving away the very same thing they're trying to sell. Said bean counter do have a point in my opinion.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#53

Post by LinuxBender »

curt15 wrote: post #29
xernus wrote: post #16

To be honest, I think this is bs. The CentOS community is huge and RH benefits a lot from the discoveries made by the community. However, doing this will effectively make CentOS as a server OS useless for the most of us. "But Facebook uses it" - well, yes, with thousands of engineers Facebook could run their own distro and still have success if they wanted. Most useless argument ever. Time to move on and find somethi…

"But Facebook uses it" Since Facebook actually uses kernels from Fedora Rawhide (necessary for btrfs support I guess), their systems are nowhere near the CentOS you and I would use.

Facebook have their own kernel developers. It was a selling point one of their teams used to try to lure me there.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#54

Post by kcb »

Iolaum wrote: post #39

I m torn about this move. My gut reaction was that this was a bean-counter move. Thinking more about it the key issues I see with this move are: - CENTOS fills a need, that many users have and superficially it looks like Red Hat (IBM) is now abandoning addressing it. On the other hand Red Hat does offer RHEL for free (gratis) [0] and that should fill the needs of CENTOS users (right?). However it would have been much…

The free developer license seems pretty useless for larger organizations and OS licenses aren't managed by developers in general anyway.

>Yes, but only one no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription can be added to a user account. While it is possible to have each developer register for their own account, this is not ideal from a management or efficiency standpoint. For example, if a company wanted no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscriptions to cover 100 developers, each developer would need to individually register and independently create 100 accounts that need to be tracked and maintained. For enterprises that use Red Hat Satellite to manage multiple systems, all 100 accounts would need to be added individually. Accepting the terms and conditions and renewing the subscription annually would need to be done individually and manually for all 100 accounts. Staff turnover in the development team would create additional management challenges with individual accounts. Therefore in terms of lost productivity, managing individual no-cost subscriptions will not be cost-effective for many groups.

Many development organizations benefit from having Red Hat Developer Support. Cost effective bundles are available that include support with a pack of 25 Developer Suite subscriptions that can be managed from a single account. Each of these subscriptions is based on systems, rather that users.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#55

Post by santoshalper »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #40

>> CentOS Stream now sits between the Fedora Project’s operating system innovation and RHEL’s production stability So if we compare to Debian, this means: Fedora Debian unstable (Sid) CentOS Stream Debian testing (currently Bullseye) RHEL Debian stable (currently Buster) quote source: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/centos-stream-building-innova... (linked from the article)

Seems like that is accurate. I am struck by how cleaner and simpler Debian's naming scheme is. If you don't follow the Red Hat world closely, those names are going to be very confusing.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#56

Post by em500 »

FeistySkink wrote: post #47
Iolaum wrote: post #39

I m torn about this move. My gut reaction was that this was a bean-counter move. Thinking more about it the key issues I see with this move are: - CENTOS fills a need, that many users have and superficially it looks like Red Hat (IBM) is now abandoning addressing it. On the other hand Red Hat does offer RHEL for free (gratis) [0] and that should fill the needs of CENTOS users (right?). However it would have been much…

Is there a free non-developer, i.e. home version of RHEL without any subscription/registration?

http://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html

Disclaimer: not affiliated with Oracle in any way. This is just the closest thing to a plain RHEL8 clone I know of, other than CentOS8.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#57

Post by syshum »

jsiepkes wrote: post #2

Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL. This front runner role was actually intended for Fedora however Fedora contains way too much experimental changes for anyone to seriously try to run it on servers. I don't want to sound too "tin-foil headed" but I guess now that RedHat has hired the main CentOS d…

>>Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS

That is only true if CentOS continues to be widely adopted, with this move by RedHat i do not see that continuing, I am sure many org's right now are looking for options to move off CentOS / RHEL stacks.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#58

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

jsiepkes wrote: post #2

Having a more "front runner" distro for RHEL (RedHat Enterprise) is great for RedHat. Since bugs will probably be caught in CentOS and don't end up in RHEL. This front runner role was actually intended for Fedora however Fedora contains way too much experimental changes for anyone to seriously try to run it on servers. I don't want to sound too "tin-foil headed" but I guess now that RedHat has hired the main CentOS d…

> People who use CentOS want a boring Linux distro like RHEL. They just don't want to pay for RHEL subscriptions.

How dare they want a free operating system?

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#59

Post by sjs382 »

kcb wrote: post #25
messe wrote: post #11

> CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021 Does this mean that CentOS 8 is EOL come 2021? Weren't maintenance updates meant to go to 2029? What about everybody who built their product on the assumption that there would be a stable CentOS until then?

Yes. https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product It used to be this. https://web.archive.org/web/20201101131417/https://wiki.cent...

Yup. Edited today. Why even publish the EOL dates, at this point? They're meaningless.

That page is a Wiki and here is the diff between the current version and the previous: https://wiki.centos.org/action/info/About/Product?action=dif...

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#60

Post by brnt »

derekp7 wrote: post #21
sim-o-lacrum wrote: post #6

I wouldn't be surprised if this means that another project will crop up soon-ish which does what CentOS did before, rebuild RHEL so there is a stable, boring distribution for people who want RHEL without wanting or being able to pay RH.

Maybe Scientific Linux can get revived.

I wonder what Cern Linux [1] are going to do. They're basically CentOS' CentOS.

[1] https://linux.web.cern.ch/

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