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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

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Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#151

Post by zxspectrum1982 »

apecat wrote: post #140
awill wrote: post #109

This is awful. It's proof of the downsides to the IBM acquisition, which I think we all knew was coming. Imagine if you were running a business, and deployed CentOS 8 based on the 10 year lifespan promise. You're totally screwed now, and Red Hat knows it. Why on earth didn't they make this switch starting with CentOS 9???? Let's not sugar coat this. They've betrayed their users. I personally run a CentOS 7 server (as…

Wonder if the web hosting industry will rebel and build another RHEL clone project that just gets the 10-year supported patches. Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? A really big chunk of the world's traditionally shared hosted websites run on CentOS, because most commercial control panel packages and hosting automation systems are built for that. A rebadged CentOS is also AWS's default distro. Wonder of…

That already exists and is called CloudLinux. It is very cheap but not free.

Other RHEL-clones: Oracle Linux (best one), Springdale Linux.

Other alternatives: openSUSE Leap and Debian. I am not even listing Ubuntu because I hate it since snaps.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#152

Post by apecat »

posix_me_less wrote: post #146
apecat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder if the web hosting industry will rebel and build another RHEL clone project that just gets the 10-year supported patches. Red Hat still has to release the patches, right? A really big chunk of the world's traditionally shared hosted websites run on CentOS, because most commercial control panel packages and hosting automation systems are built for that. A rebadged CentOS is also AWS's default distro. Wonder of…

That would be cool "stick it to the man" trick, but how do we organize?

Well, GoDaddy, or heh, AWS are The Man.

My best hope is that the major hosting vendors, or maybe some industry consortium might offer resources for this.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#153

Post by nicoburns »

gmfawcett wrote: post #119

Interesting development. What's the current difference between RHEL and Oracle Linux? Our institution used to be an RHEL shop, but switched to OL -- I just assumed that RHEL was historical at this point. [edit -- thanks for the answers. I realize now that my memory failed me... I mis-remembered that Oracle bought RedHat, not IBM.]

Presumably one big benefit is not having to deal with Oracle who are infamously difficult to deal with.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#155

Post by space_ghost »

em500 wrote: post #69

To me this news is at once shocking, and blindingly obvious in hindsight. Shocking, because I'd never imagined they'd kill off CentOS 8 so early. CentOS 8.0 dates from Sept 2019, so it's killed in just the 3rd year of its presumed 10 year lifespan. I could read the tea leaves when they announced this Stream thingy recently, but I'd thought they would at least hold off till RHEL9 to pull the lever. Blindingly obvious,…

FreeBSD is starting to look really good.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#156

Post by ojnabieoot »

bitcharmer wrote: post #127
jychang wrote: post #117

So basically, instead of CentOS being as stable as RHEL, they're positioning it in between Fedora and RHEL stability. Basically the Debian Testing branch for RHEL. This is just a rebranding move to push businesses that were using CentOS to actually buy a RHEL license, lol.

> Generally speaking, we expect CentOS Stream to have fewer bugs and more runtime features than RHEL until those packages make it into the RHEL release So basically not what your comment is trying to imply here. Also, what is "lol" about it?

Not what stability means in this context - naively, CentOS Stream is considerably more likely to lead to broken development builds, inscrutable library inconsistencies, driver weirdness, etc, than the previous distribution model. It also poses ugly questions for teams who need certified processes or strict security requirements.

I could be missing something and I don’t think the motivations are strictly mercantile, but this does make CentOS Stream much less appealing (compared to RHEL) than CentOS 7/8. I am personally not that affected by all this (my org uses RHEL) but it’s a huge hassle for a good number of serious CentOS users.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#158

Post by microtonal »

FeistySkink wrote: post #108
mattdm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a little confused by this. Well, first, I'd encourage you to try Fedora Workstation for your family -- we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option). But second, if a "Fedora LTS" would fit your needs, why not give CentOS Stream a look? It's not actually going to be that different from CentOS Linux,…

Thank you for the reply. While I personally never had a single issue with upgrading between Fedora releases, I also have the skills the resolve any potential ones if I would. I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. So far CentOS fit that niche beautifully, with seldom major clean reinstalls (i.e. wipe root) when I'm there (7.x > 8.x). I'm goi…

I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist.

Fedora Silverblue could be interesting alternative to regular Fedora then, since you can boot into or roll back to a previous release. You can also pin a known-good OSTree commit, so that one could always boot that version.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#159

Post by mattdm »

brnt wrote: post #122
mattdm wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS Stream is going to move at the same pace as RHEL, just ahead of it.

What does that mean? That it is more up to date than RHEL? How far behind Fedora is that?

Fedora releases every six months. RHEL has a major release every three years, with minor releases every six months.

The major release of RHEL is usually forked from a Fedora version about a year before the major release, so with some exceptions software versions tend to be about a year behind those in a Fedora release initially, and then as RH backports patches rather than revving versions, drifts further.

It's the patches and smaller updates — and new hardware enablement in the full-support phase — that will be landing in CentOS Stream. Previously, this stuff was developed internally and only released to the world at the minor-release drop every six months. Now, it'll be developed in a shared space. So what you'll have in CentOS Stream is whatever is intended to ship in a RHEL minor update within six months.

There may occasionally be a situation where an update introduces bugs into Stream that would have been caught by QA before a public minor RHEL release and subsequent CentOS Linux rebuild. But I don't actually expect that to happen enough to worry about in any case where you can justify not paying for actual supported RHEL in the first place.

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