CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream • Hacker News Board

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#271

Post by kbenson » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:24 PM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #251

chasil wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle already has a clone that performs an in-place conversion of an installed CentOS 7 system. There is a page describing the conversion: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ They have a shell script to convert a CentOS install to Oracle Linux, so you can buy support if you want. The converter only works with versions 5, 6, and 7. It does not work with CentOS 8. It would be nice if that could get updated.

I don't think many people who want to use something stable like CentOS, but don't want to pay for a RHEL support contract would want to pay Oracle for RHEL-but-with-Oracle-sprinkles-on-top

Not to mention Oracle is not known to leave money on the table, and if they see they can start charging for Oracle Linux because there's no large well known free version, I wouldn't put it past them.

Put another way, if you jump ship from CentOS because IBM caused Red Hat to change it into a funnel to pay them money, if you landed on Oracle, you might be setting yourself up to do it all over again fairly soon.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#272

Post by Shared404 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

space_ghost wrote: post #155

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.

I agree. I've been seeing more and more about the BSD's online recently, and to be quite honest, I'm happy about that.

Just installed OpenBSD for the first time the other day, and am loving it.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#273

Post by pnutjam » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:26 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #192

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they switch to Debian instead? Their emphasis on stability matches that of CentOS more than Ubuntu, or at least did.

Because some important vendors don't target Debian whereas they do target Ubuntu. Canonical and RedHat are paying the salaries of the people steering the direction of Linux as a whole. They're forcing you to choose between the two.

Your forgetting Suse, I'll bet they take a big chunk of the customer base. OpenSuse LEAP is now identical to SLES and it can be converted easily if you want support.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#274

Post by pnutjam » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

FeistySkink wrote: post #125

dilawar wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been using openSUSE. It's been pretty stable on the laptop. On laptop, I use the Tumbleweed (rolling release) and 15.1 or 15.2 on servers. Give it a try.

What's the package management like? Does it support flatpaks? And what about LTS?

Zypper is awesome. The newest version of LEAP is identical to Suse Enterprise, you can convert with a simple script if you decide you want extended support.

The root filesystem uses btrfs, so it's easy to roll back update problems. There is also a newer version that uses a read-only root filesystem and updates are applied to a new snapshot that takes over when you reboot. It's pretty cool.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#275

Post by notabee » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

symlinkk wrote: post #265

jcrites wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon Linux 2 could be a viable alternative. In addition to being available to run on AWS, it's also available as a container image and in various machine image formats: https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-2/#Resources AL has had enough work put into it over the years that, while it may have been inspired by CentOS/RHEL originally, calling it a rebadged CentOS is not accurate these days. A full and competent team ma…

I’d like to use Amazon Linux but it doesn’t seem like they provide ISOs. Seems like it’s intended to be used largely on EC2.

We had some folks try installing Amazon Linux images in our network. They spammed the network looking for a nonexistent link local metadata service, which is how we found out about them.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#276

Post by hddherman » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

bsg75 wrote: post #262

hddherman wrote: post #249

Very disappointing, since I based my OS decision on their support cycle, which has now been thrown out the window. Guess that I will be going back to Debian again And to top it off, today was the day when a CentOS 8 kernel update broke ZFS. Again.

> today was the day when a CentOS 8 kernel update broke ZFS This issue? https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/11307

Yes, I believe that's the one, and this isn't the first time a CentOS specific issue has been discovered.

For comparison, I have a Debian 10 box running since February. Also runs ZFS, updates and restarts every day, and absolutely 0 issues with that setup.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#277

Post by cesarb » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:33 PM UTC

mattdm wrote: post #96

FeistySkink wrote: post #45

Oh, wow. My whole extended family has CentOS on their machines for years because of LTS. Not sure what I'm going to replace it with now and how. Perhaps there's going to be Fedora LTS at some point soon. I sure hope Fedora is not the next casualty. IBM strikes again.

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,…

> 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)

In my experience (just went through that, F32 -> F33), it's painless but definitely not "an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee"; each machine took a whole day, it's a huge download (many gigabytes) and the install itself seems to be severely fsync-limited (several hours while the progress bar slowly fills and the disk light is lit all the time; after the fact, "journalctl -b -1" shows it was installing/cleaning package by package all that time).

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#278

Post by bayindirh » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #246

bayindirh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a silent but relatively big user base of CentOS in HPC and scientific computing. ScientificLinux and CentOS rules all HPC clusters. Clusters are like enterprise servers. Big, monolithic, rarely upgraded. They're upgraded in one big-fell swoop and left to run. There'll be another clone of RHEL since HPC can't accept CentOS Stream as the alternative. The whole infra is too big to move to Debian too. So with tod…

Oracle already has a clone that performs an in-place conversion of an installed CentOS 7 system. There is a page describing the conversion: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/ They have a shell script to convert a CentOS install to Oracle Linux, so you can buy support if you want. The converter only works with versions 5, 6, and 7. It does not work with CentOS 8. It would be nice if that could get updated.

In our setup we don't need any add-ons that Oracle brings to the table. We also don't need their greed too.

We only need RH equal of Debian, since the software we use generally have explicit CentOS/RHEL support.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#279

Post by pnutjam » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:39 PM UTC

jmnicolas wrote: post #231

mrweasel wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> why RedHat is giving away the very same thing they're trying to sell Goodwill. I use CentOS and until now if I had a project were Linux support had been important I would have gone with Redhat. They can rot in hell now.

Have you heard of OpenSuse.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#280

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Dec 08, 2020, 7:40 PM UTC

briffle wrote: post #86

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,…

Its time for a new internet rule. If Oracle or IBM buys your vendor, you should be migrating.

That's almost true for any project getting acquired. The big EvilCorp will always have it's overbearing corporatey corporateness crush the things that made the project so cool it attracted their attention to it. There are very few projects that actually improved from being acquired.