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Centos.rip

centos.rip

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Re: Centos.rip

#111

Post by bamboozled »

ofrzeta wrote: post #104
bamboozled wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“my impression of CentOS is "a Linux with lots of horribly outdated software” It is and it’s the secret reason Docker and Containers became so popular. I’ve been a systems administrator for sometime now. At some point developers wanted to run Python 3 on CentOS 6 and here we are. It allowed the systems administrators to let the developers go wild in their own sandbox and keep the systems “pristine”.

There are several third-party repos to install up to date software on CentOS.

It’s better now, wasn’t there when Docker came along.

You also missed my point, the infrastructure teams already built stable infra on CentOS, the work was done. They didn’t always account for people wanting to run new versions of Imagemagick to process user uploaded photos, . This is what developers needed. They wanted to pipe curl through gunzip to get what was required.

Docker ticked the boxes for devs and ops.

Re: Centos.rip

#112

Post by shawnz »

qalmakka wrote: post #106
rntksi wrote: post #64

I've had to argue a lot of time at work on the merit of running a Debian system. Everyone coming in has always been keen on just getting CentOS up for a server. Outside vendors also just tell me: "we need CentOS X for this", and I've never understood the reason for that. Having run both systems, I know that Debian is much more solid. Sometimes the argument even comes down to: "Oh but when I search online for guides,…

I personally hate Debian because of APT and the fact that it tends to do way too many things behind your back, things that sometimes backfire horrendously as soon as you stray too much from the path Debian dug (Ubuntu is the best example of how APT can self implode as soon as you start adding weird repositories and the scripts that keep Debian afloat start breaking). I've had to recover way too many Ubuntu installs t…

I have not experienced any of these issues. Do you have an example of a reproducible bug in apt involving third-party repositories? And how is RPM more reliable than DPKG? I have not seen either of them exhibit what I would call reliability issues (i.e. crashes)

Re: Centos.rip

#113

Post by ddevault »

helen___keller wrote: post #110
ddevault wrote: post #17

I would advise anyone who's using this as an opportunity to move on to greener pastures in terms of distributions to consider Alpine Linux: https://alpinelinux.org SourceHut runs entirely on Alpine, as do my personal workstations. It is extremely reliable, stable, and robust; maintainable over long periods of time with minimal effort; and small and simple enough to be easily understood by everyone responsible for its…

While I'm interested in Alpine and will take a look at it, I think it's in a different class than CentOS. A look at the release schedule[0] suggests that major versions are supported for 2 years. In contrast, major releases of CentOS historically were supported for a stunning 10 years (until yesterdays' announcement, which moved the support window for CentOS 8 from 2029 to 2021). I've worked with companies that had b…

The upgrade pace of Alpine is quite reasonable, especially considering that breakage is extremely rare. Expecting to set up a box and not touch it for 10 years is... not reasonable. If that's what you wanted from CentOS, then you have a broken organization.

Re: Centos.rip

#114

Post by lordlimecat »

skrebbel wrote: post #47

Not knowing much about Linux distros, can anyone explain the popularity of CentOS to me? I mean, having used it only a few times, my impression of CentOS is "a Linux with lots of horribly outdated software, in the name of compatibility and well-testedness". Eg when I used it last, the PHP version it shipped with was 8 years old. Now, I understand the appeal of that to certain super risk averse enterprises who value s…

Anyone who has dealt with diverse, mixed-distro environments can tell you that CentOS / RHEL is a lot more "stable" than Ubuntu. Go try to script ip address changes or MAC reporting across Ubuntu 12.04 - 20.04 for instance, theyve changed the tooling like 3 times. With CentOS, deprecation has a long tail, so whatever works on 8.0 is likely to work in 7.0 (going back to 2012) and maybe even 6.5.

Likewise, in those mixed environments, go run `apt upgrade` and `dnf upgrade` across the board; your CentOS / RHEL breakage will be quite small, compared with the havoc that will occur in your Ubuntu deployment.

Re: Centos.rip

#115

Post by ossusermivami »

encom wrote: post #75
someday_somehow wrote: post #52

I hope IBM/Redhat see how negatively this decision has been received and announce a reversal in the coming few days.

1. Denial 2. Anger 3. Bargaining 4. Depression 5. Acceptance You are at 3.

I think I am 4, it's too hard for me to manage my own distro and update my packages when this will be EOL, so I have to wait and see, is there any alternative to CentOS aside of Debian and Ubuntu ?

Thanks,

Re: Centos.rip

#117

Post by invokestatic »

ddevault wrote: post #113
helen___keller wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm interested in Alpine and will take a look at it, I think it's in a different class than CentOS. A look at the release schedule[0] suggests that major versions are supported for 2 years. In contrast, major releases of CentOS historically were supported for a stunning 10 years (until yesterdays' announcement, which moved the support window for CentOS 8 from 2029 to 2021). I've worked with companies that had b…

The upgrade pace of Alpine is quite reasonable, especially considering that breakage is extremely rare. Expecting to set up a box and not touch it for 10 years is... not reasonable. If that's what you wanted from CentOS, then you have a broken organization.

It wasn’t just 10 years of support, it’s 10 years of ABI stability as well. If that wasn’t a big selling point, I don’t think Red Hat or Microsoft would be as successful as they have been in enterprise.

Re: Centos.rip

#119

Post by rntksi »

qalmakka wrote: post #106
rntksi wrote: post #64

I've had to argue a lot of time at work on the merit of running a Debian system. Everyone coming in has always been keen on just getting CentOS up for a server. Outside vendors also just tell me: "we need CentOS X for this", and I've never understood the reason for that. Having run both systems, I know that Debian is much more solid. Sometimes the argument even comes down to: "Oh but when I search online for guides,…

I personally hate Debian because of APT and the fact that it tends to do way too many things behind your back, things that sometimes backfire horrendously as soon as you stray too much from the path Debian dug (Ubuntu is the best example of how APT can self implode as soon as you start adding weird repositories and the scripts that keep Debian afloat start breaking). I've had to recover way too many Ubuntu installs t…

I've ran a lot of systems for the past 15+ years and I can honestly say that for servers, Debian is the most solid I've been able to run. (Debian, not Ubuntu). Especially because of its release cycle and no-nonsense vision. I'm not sure which Debian release you've had experience with, but ever since Debian Stretch it's been very solid.

Another system (altogether different since it's not Linux) that comes close to Debian in terms of solidness is FreeBSD. However, the experience of doing `dist-upgrade` for Debian from a release to another is miles better than `freebsd-upgrade` and the shenanigans of upgrading all your ports tree. I have to do that once every 2-3 years, and it takes an hour for Debian, whereas it takes half a day for FreeBSD (for example I just had to do that recently for a 10.x to 12.2 database running on FreeBSD system)

I would definitely NOT recommend Ubuntu. If one looks at Ubuntu and think it's like Debian - it's not. It doesn't come close at all in terms of robustness. An unrelated example: once you have Ubuntu up, there's tons of service that I don't know serves what purpose that's already running. For Debian, that does not happen, you have a minimal set running.

Also, you can keep running Debian for years before having to touch anything. This is one of the behaviour I'm looking for when I consider systems for work (what I mean by "solid"/"robust").

So rolling release systems like Arch serves a totally different purpose.

Re: Centos.rip

#120

Post by JeremyNT »

skrebbel wrote: post #47

Not knowing much about Linux distros, can anyone explain the popularity of CentOS to me? I mean, having used it only a few times, my impression of CentOS is "a Linux with lots of horribly outdated software, in the name of compatibility and well-testedness". Eg when I used it last, the PHP version it shipped with was 8 years old. Now, I understand the appeal of that to certain super risk averse enterprises who value s…

It's the same value as Debian stable: you don't need to mess with it, and you don't need to learn anything new until the next big release.

RHEL / CentOS also has a lot of commercial software packaged and sold for it. You'll find plenty of niche market software shops that don't want to bother targeting more than one distribution, and that being the case they target RHEL. If you're writing and selling some niche business software, do you really want to dedicate your limited support resources (which, let's be honest, are probably your developers!) to supporting other distros?

At the end of the day, what do you need from the distribution itself? It's a tool to run the software you care about. Some distributions take pride in providing that software as a part of the distribution, but not RHEL. RHEL is stable, it's a known entity. You want a newer version of PHP? Go for it, but you're building and packaging your own on RHEL. And for many shops - not just enterprises - the "you" here is not actually anybody at the company, but some external vendor or some OSS project maintainer who packages everything (including dependencies) for RHEL.

And by the way, this is why Docker containers are so popular now - you can incorporate whatever system libs you want directly in your deployment bundle, and know that if the base system can run Docker you don't have to think about it. Something old and crufty like RHEL, as long as it has good Docker support (yes, arguable...) - you never need to care how old and crufty it is (they DO backport major kernel improvements to their custom kernels).

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