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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

lists.centos.org

431–440 of 642 posts

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#431

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Fedora Silverblue can be an option then - the roots is an immutable snapshots tracked by OSTree It can build an updated OSTree snapshot in the background & only the difference from what you have are downloaded. Then you reboot into that new snapshot, while still having the old one (and ony other you care to keep) available, in case something is not right with the new one. That should address most of the issues you me…

Silverblue, in my experience, is not really there. I like the idea. As of my latest try at it in August, I wouldn't recommend anybody recommend it unless they're going to be physically standing in front of the machine on a regular basis.

Yeah, it's true that the people I know that use it do so on workstations. Still IMHO the technology (OSTree) is solid & perfect match for various server & mobile use cases. Once mature enough of course. :)

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#432
post #168

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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.

Oh cool. As for CloudLinux, "not free" probably scale for some hosting environments, including non-managed cloud instances. But something like Springdale, given resources, might be able to provide. They're still tracking RHEL 7, though. Debian and Ubuntu, which offer five years of Long Term Support are the next best thing available, and that's already kind of tight for long-term deployments of self-hosted, old-fashio…

I trust Canonical more than Debian for security fixes. Canonical has a dedicated security team.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#433
post #425

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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…

Okay, this is a serious question. For me, not an official RH position. In my time in HPC, nodes were baked with a specific image and then that basically never ever got updates. As I came to that as a sysadmin from other areas, I found that somewhat horrifying, but it seemed pretty universal. Have things changed such that applying patches regularly (like, more often than once a month or so except in emergencies) is a…

No, they haven't changed in my experience.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#434
post #246

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.

There are two types of people: People who haven't used Oracle yet, and people who will never use it again.

And I'll forever hate them for what they did to Java (and in setting the precedent that APIs can be copyrighted).

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#435

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> That in no way explains why they don't continue to have both Because they don't need it anymore. CentOS Linux or other rebuilds can still exist (just not using the name; I disagree with that but I can understand Red Hat doesn't want its name attached to something that might have large delays in security fixes in the future) if somebody funds it or volunteers to do it, just like CentOS still supports Xen but RHEL do…

>>> it's a change that has strictly technical motives. I understand the business reasons for doing so. I don't agree with anyone branding this as done for purely technical reasons. Having CentOS Stream may be needed for technical reasons. Stopping CentOS 8 is in no way a technical decision. They are unrelated in any technical sense. If Red Hat just doesn't want to put resources towards CentOS as it traditionally exis…

The thing is, Red Hat never considered the distro more than a side effect of providing a base for developing "things" that will run on RHEL. It's even written on the centos.org home page, the distro is not why CentOS existed in 2020. So the fact that users (including myself!!) enjoyed a free distro as a result was not a part of Red Hat's RHEL strategy in any way.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#436

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Packages are RPMS, managed with zypper. You may also use dnf but you will miss some of the advanced features provided by dnf (e. g. the concept of patches vs updates), there was a zypper vs dnf thread recently in the openSUSE mailing lists. It does support flatpaks. There is no free openSUSE LTS. The LTS is called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, costs some money (unless you are a developer, in that case you get free su…

Ooops, I meant "you will miss some of the advanced features provided by zypper". It's dnf what's lacking the concept of patch, and many more.

On the other hand, dnf/yum downloads repos and packages in parallel while zypper still does everything one at a time, which means every kilobyte-sized package takes a second or two each to download, from setting up and tearing down a new TCP connection each time. It's especially annoying in Tumbleweed because rolling distro == lots of tiny packages updates all the time.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this hurts. My use case is specific: I'm a dev but since we're 2 in the IT service with barely any budget I'm also a (modest) sysadmin and they also call me when the printer or the TV doesn't work. So a few years ago when Debian decided to have faster release cycles I migrated all my VM to CentOS: once the OS is installed I don't want to think about it for the next 10 years. I still didn't finish my Windows 7 to…

Before giving up on us just yet, I'd encourage you to check out our developer program for proper RHEL that's free. And I'd stay tuned for announcements that are coming in the first half of 2021 (as mentioned in our FAQ). You might find we've got a program for you: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10

> in the first half of 2021

Well, you've panicked people who are/were moving forward with CentOS 6/7 to 8, and not on RHEL because no budget. "Don't worry, sometime in the next 6 months there might be useful info for you, or there might not".

People aren't going to stick around waiting for that information. You've pulled the rug out from under us and we need to plan sooner rather than later. RHEL isn't do-able due to cost, CentOS isn't do-able because you've just killed it, so away we have to go.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#439

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FreeBSD is starting to look really good.

What are the usual roadblocks for people?

Needing VMs to perform well, comparably to KVM/Xen, would be a blocker for going BSD.

Jails are awesome but not containers you're blocked there as well (if you need containers and the tooling around them).

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#440
post #388

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From https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/ CentOS Stream Continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL. For anyone interested in participating and collaborating in the RHEL ecosystem, CentOS Stream is your reliable platform for innovation. That doesn't seem to be what you think it is, at least in my eyes. I'…

From the FAQ https://centos.org/distro-faq/ : "Q6: Will there be separate/parallel/simultaneous streams for 8, 9, 10, etc? "A: Each major release will have a branch, similar to how CentOS Linux is currently structured; however, CentOS Stream is designed to focus on RHEL development, so only the latest Stream will have the marketing focus of the CentOS Project. "Because RHEL development cycles overlap, there will be t…

I'm not sure if you don't understand how RHEL/CentOS point releases and bugfixes work, or if you're reading something in the FAQ I'm not.

Right now, in RHEL 8.2, if a package needs a bug fix, it will be back-ported so that you get the fix in the existing running version of that package that was shipped in 8.2. On point releases, RHEL (and thus CentOS) may choose to back-port a feature, functionality, or choose to update the version of the package that is running to a newer version that has those features or functionality (or to bring it in-line with back-patches, I assume). When you update to a new point release, this gives you a single large update set that you can test to make sure functions well in your infrastructure. There have been points in the past where changes in point releases have required us to make changes to our configs or setup to deal with the RHEL/CentOS's point release changes (even though it's supposed to be rare, it happens, but it's mostly contained to these big testable update sets).

CentOS mirrored this exactly, because it mirrored RHEL.

Now CentOS is going to do something different, and these updates that would be relegated to point releases look like they are going to come down continuously. While not as problematic as something like Fedora, this is still something that groups specifically chose CentOS to avoid.

It's nice that Red Hat is offering something to allow people to get fixes and features sooner than at point release times, but to switch CentOS to only providing that is extremely problematic to the very large community that expects otherwise, supported CentOS, and has done both since prior to Red Hat hiring some of the main CentOS developers and effectively controlling the project, and is notably different than what CentOS has always traditionally attempted to provide.

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