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CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

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Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#521

Post by jnwatson »

zamalek wrote: post #496
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…

> For my server I want a boring, stable OS, so I'm definitely not using Streams. Have you considered Ubuntu Server? "Being boring" and "having no vision" are frequent critiques of Ubuntu, which(as we probably all know) can be the highest possible compliment in some scenarios, like servers. They also have pretty decent LTS.

Dunno. I just spent an hour trying to figure out how to set the DNS server on an interface on Ubuntu Server 20.04. There's no ifconfig, /etc/resolv.conf is out, no nslookup, /etc/network/interfaces is completely out.

It is like a completely new OS to me, and I've been hacking on UNIXes for 25 years now.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#522

Post by jlgaddis »

curt15 wrote: post #106
mattdm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this will be expanding to cover more use cases. See https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-centos-stream-updates#Q10 : _In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better serve the needs of…

How about discounts for universities? They could take a page from Microsoft, which introduces students and teachers to its ecosystem with low-cost versions of Windows and Office.

The .edu I used to work at had a site license for RHEL (and Satellite servers) 15+ years or so ago.

I believe we were one of the first 10 or so, but I don't remember exactly when it started.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#523

Post by bonzini »

kbenson wrote: post #493
bonzini wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That only makes sense if Red Hat started CentOS. They didn't. The fact that they took control of it then changed it, even the web page, and then are not effectively killed the reason people are using it, is the thing I'm upset about. If I effectively took control of the EFF and then a couple years later changed the website copy to say that the EFF is a vehicle for litigating cases that kbenson thinks are important, a…

> I think we're all worse off for that.

I don't disagree.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#524

Post by silly-silly »

marktangotango wrote: post #83
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,…

It's a money grab, pure and simple. They've (Redhat, let alone IBM) done it before (see below). What happens in practice with this sort of "rolling release" is users end up patching endlessly in production, which no sane person or organization would ever want to do. This was the exact situation for another Redhat acquisition for years now. JBoss EAP and community editions (wildfly now I suppose), everyone who could m…

Just so we're clear, you don't want updates ?

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#525

Post by bonzini »

Koshkin wrote: post #442
bonzini wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Because they don't need it anymore. Isn’t that the crux of the problem? CentOS used to be about “us” (the users), not “them.”

Fire up the wayback machine and find when the centos.org home page changed the mission statement. At this point it started to be about a different "us" than you think, an "us" that doesn't include you and me and presumably doesn't mind CentOS Stream at all.

In particular I started doing that and I got to the Sep 2019-Dec 2019 range, around the time CentOS Stream was launched. At that time this:

> For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon

was changed to this:

> CentOS Linux is a consistent, manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For some open source communities, it is a solid, predictable base to build upon.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#526

Post by jmnicolas »

bubblethink wrote: post #494
jmnicolas wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but how long before Canonical pull the same move as RedHat? The way i see it, Canonical is trying to build a moat (lastly with Snap). I think I'm going back to Debian for my servers. i wish they add 10 years lts though.

>i wish they add 10 years lts though I really don't get this fascination with 10 year LTS. Why is it so hard to upgrade in half a decade ? I mean this is such an arbitrary number. If RHEL started offering 50 year support, people will complain that Debian is 1/10th of RHEL.

I'd take 50 years in a heartbeat. I'm barely Linux literate and I have many many more pressing things to do than upgrade servers.

If you want to know more I wrote about it in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25348914

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#527

Post by jlgaddis »

Communitivity wrote: post #460

It does not matter if nightlies are more stable than they used to be. It does not matter if nightlies never crash. If you work in an industry or corporation that is highly security conscious, i.e. that prizes risk mitigation over using the cutting edge or getting to market first above all else, then you won't be able to use nightlies. Security policy will dictate that you use use a stable versioned release, that the…

> If you work in an industry or corporation that is highly security conscious, i.e. that prizes risk mitigation over using the cutting edge or getting to market first above all else, then you won't be able to use nightlies.

> Security policy will dictate that you use use a stable versioned release, that the release be vetted through scripts/STIGs, and that the release be installed by Security+ certified and blessed admins.

I'd be quite surprised if your "security policy" has all of that and yet doesn't have a requirement for "commercial support" (i.e., Red Hat Enterprise Linux).

Besides, if $employer "is highly security conscious", your machines are almost certainly airgapped and getting their updates from a Satellite server that you're already paying Red Hat for.

AFAIK, CentOS is not now -- nor has it ever been -- "certified" for anything. Did that change at some point without me noticing?

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#528

Post by pjmlp »

bayindirh wrote: post #235
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…

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…

I was at CERN when ScientificLinux was created, back then it was actually based in Red Hat, there was no CentOS.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#529

Post by soraminazuki »

norswap wrote: post #462
Jimmc414 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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. The hypothetical you posed is the actual situation, I am now learning, I have apparently forced on my team. We've ramped up labor 3x revenue preparing product launch in 90 - 180 days. We created an image containing centos 8 , Java , postgres and tomcat a year ago an…

I'm wondering, what ties you so strongly to a single OS? Nay, to a single Linux distribution? I have a hard time imagining, and the only scenarios that come to mind are those where things have gone awfully haywire. I'm sure I'm missing something. Enlighten me?

Software doesn’t run on its own. They rely on bunch of other software that is typically provided by distributions. So unless there’s some magic piece of technology that can take CentOS RPMs and make it work flawlessly on any Linux distro, the entire software industry is suddenly going to have to spend significant amounts of time on repackaging work.

Re: CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream

#530

Post by apecat »

mekster wrote: post #474
apecat wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Debian is particularly impressive, since they, on paper, aim to support all packages with security fixes, whereas Ubuntu's main repo is a lot more limited. What are the track records of the claim? I'm sure Ubuntu will patch stuff up if some vulnerability shows up outside of main that gets patched upstream or elsewhere.

> What are the track records of the claim?

I claim no deep expertise on this, but for a distribution of 56k packages, this looks quite good https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/status/release/s...

To anyone here who's worked secops and has to track these things, I'm really interested to hear opinions about how well Debian follows up on this

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