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Rocky Linux 9.0

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Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#51

Post by linsomniac »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Former consultant here: There are a lot of entities out there that aren't really a good fit for Red Hat's service offerings, but who may still need the system. As others have said, Red Hat is a great provider if you may need support from someone deep in the bowels of the exact code you're having a problem with.

Having consultants out there using CentOS/Rocky/whatever gets these "not a good fit" customers burden off Red Hat, which is probably an advantage to them. I operated what amounts to a "phone a Linux friend" service for ~18 years, and that sort of help just doesn't really fit into Red Hat's offering.

It's nice in many ways to be able to disconnect from the licensing model and just be able to deploy Linux boxes, but still get help when you need it. I recall one conversation about Red Hat licensing related to a machine I was installing for a client named "The Fedora Project" that went like this:

"I assume you'd like me to put Red Hat on there?" "Yes." "Can you provide me with a license key to use on it?" "Uhhh. Just go ahead and install CentOS".

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#52

Post by carwyn »

bityard wrote: post #37
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not getting the same level of support that they would from Red Hat. There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the…

It goes further than that. If you file a bug on Red Hat's bugzilla with or without a support contract, you will quite often get a response if you put the effort into producing a detailed report. No guarantee, sometimes just others with the same issue, but still pretty good. You will also find Red Hat employees on the mailing lists for the OSS projects they contribute or depend on who actively participate in conversations there.

If you have a support contract though and open a case, the level and quality of support is usually very high.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#53

Post by Twirrim »

freedomben wrote: post #42
bubblethink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.

You're not wrong, but CentOS (from inception) has always been really slow to release. When RHEL 7 dropped it took months to get the first CentOS build. CentOS having the same found, it isn't terribly surprising to me to see them be a little slower. When Alma launched, speed of updates was a specific goal of theirs because CentOS had been so painful in that area. Most of the time I think it's fine. Mainly it hurts whe…

There's reasons why it takes time. The perspective that it's "just produce rebranded RPMs" really undersells even something as significant as the amount of server power required to recompile all the packages. You couldn't get the packages until the distribution upstream had released, so no way to get ahead of the build time. You just had to suck it up at release time.

You used to be able to track the build process for CentOS when it was a RHEL clone, see how many packages were left to go as the days crawled past.

Things are a little better with the way that development happens more recently. 6 was a massive delay for distributions because RedHat had overhauled a lot around the build process and distributions needed to completely overhaul their stuff too, in ways that weren't that obvious.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#54

Post by jacobr1 »

carwyn wrote: post #52
bityard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not getting the same level of support that they would from Red Hat. There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the…

It goes further than that. If you file a bug on Red Hat's bugzilla with or without a support contract, you will quite often get a response if you put the effort into producing a detailed report. No guarantee, sometimes just others with the same issue, but still pretty good. You will also find Red Hat employees on the mailing lists for the OSS projects they contribute or depend on who actively participate in conversat…

Is this still true after the IBM acquisition?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#55

Post by korlja »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

RedHat licenses are just too expensive by sticker price. Beancounters haunt us for deploying RedHat because "the Windows license for that box would have been cheaper in our licensing model". That there is support included which we never use doesn't matter to them, the usual suggestion being "buy support for one box, test everything on that one, and open a support case for that one box, replicate the solution everywhere".

If you want to fix this, make a RedHat license be significantly cheaper than the equivalent Windows product. Charge for support by ticket/case and only support licensed boxes. You'll earn a lot more because it'll look cheaper to the beancounters.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#56

Post by rubyist5eva »

bubblethink wrote: post #13
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #11

Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases

They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.

Alma Linux has always been faster for releases since the beginning. I believe their first release was 8.3 and was very ahead of Rocky and they've maintained that pace to this day. Security updates are within a day or two, point releases are within 7 days and I think the 9.0 release was less than a month.

This is probably because the project was initially founded by Cloud Linux, which I believe already had the expertise to do RedHat clones and basically donated the setup - whereas Rocky started from scratch from what I can tell.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#57

Post by cies »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Did CentOS not do the same? RH bought them, right? Then changed it to a rolling release experiment. I guess that was a talent acquisition? So RH benefited off the previous attempt to do this.

Also RH packages open source project and also does not necessarily gives back to every project.

The right to help your neighbor is important to open source. I find Rocky does just that.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#58

Post by rubyist5eva »

freedomben wrote: post #20
bravetraveler wrote: post #4

Is anyone aware of a decent reference comparing say Alma and Rocky? I imagine the 'product' is essentially the same, but policies or procedures may differ - and these can be significant! It's what draws me to the Fedora project so much. Asking as someone who wasn't really that bothered by CentOS Stream. I've seen it as basically rolling point releases, which wouldn't be a problem for me personally

Disclaimer: Former Red Hat employee My info might be slightly outdated cause last I looked into it was a few months ago, but I would guess it's not terribly different. Yes both are essentially the same product. Main differences from user perspective are reliability of package servers and speed of updates, plus community experience if you get involved there (friendly tip: I suggest you stay the hell away from the cess…

What are you going to do when support for CentOS Stream 8 ends in 2024? Alma Linux 8 is supported until 2029 at least - for me it's a no brainer to use Alma for something like a database server.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#59

Post by legalcorrection »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Red Hat can develop a closed-source OS and sue people who copy it, but then no one would use their product. If one of your major selling points is open source, not to mention benefiting from all of the non-RH developed code that is in RHEL, you can't complain about the perfectly predictable consequences of that.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#60

Post by jonathanspw »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #56
bubblethink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.

Alma Linux has always been faster for releases since the beginning. I believe their first release was 8.3 and was very ahead of Rocky and they've maintained that pace to this day. Security updates are within a day or two, point releases are within 7 days and I think the 9.0 release was less than a month. This is probably because the project was initially founded by Cloud Linux, which I believe already had the experti…

point releases are usually within 3 days and 9.0 release was within 10 days :)
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