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Rocky Linux 9.0

rockylinux.org

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Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#111

Post by placatedmayhem »

Galanwe wrote: post #88
stonogo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority o…

> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…

The CentOS project itself called Greg a founding member in a blog post interviewing him in 2019, well before the Red Hat/CentOS events in December 2020.

https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/

For what it's worth, The Register refers to Greg as a CentOS founder in their first Rocky article:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux

If you have some references to back your assertions, I would very much like to see them. You're not the first person I've seen assert that Greg shouldn't be called a founder of CentOS, but I've yet to see that backed up.

Also, you seem to minimize the non-technical, especially legal, work around setting up and maintaining a distribution, but I don't understand why. In terms of legal work, trademarks need to be registered, non-profits need to be set up to fund critical items like build infrastructure, and more. Each of these seems like exceptionally valuable, if not critical, to the success of a distribution.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#112

Post by awill »

Elv13 wrote: post #109
awill wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this a concern? If Alma and Rocky are essential identical, speed is the only/main differentiator, and it matters. If an urgent vulnerability gets patched in RHEL, and I'm using Rocky or Alma, I want the one that gets patched sooner. Right now, that's Alma.

Would you rather have `.rpm`s build by someone on the command line using `rpmbuild` or `mock` or something built by a CI with proper bootstraping and "nearer" to reproduceable builds. Also, by cutting corners on the CI, you risk introducing mild ABI problems which wont crash, but causes instabilities and potential security vulnerabilities. If they say they needed time to do it properly, I respect that.

if that's the case, why in your example is someone running rpmbuild doing it so much faster than an automated CI system. If your reasoning is that it will be faster in the future. Fine. But I doubt it. Criticizing Alma because it was first sounds like FUD.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#113

Post by cturner »

gravitate wrote: post #5

Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?

Driver compatibility with redhat. Niche hardware like stack bypass network cards, packet capture cards, fpga cards will tend to have drivers issued for redhat, but not always for anything else. By using rocky/alma, you improve your odds to dodge hassle adapting the driver packs to other linux distros.

Net booting. Distros vary in how awkward it is to get stripped setups set up for net booting. My experience is that the redhat world distros are easier for this than the debian world.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#114

Post by justinclift »

Galanwe wrote: post #88
stonogo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority o…

> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…

> doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff

Why are you not considering PR/legal/community stuff as being worthy?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#115

Post by silisili »

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days?

I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability.

But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion random services running at any time because it's a dev machine, and... nothing really ever breaks. I get kernel vulnerability patches in a couple days, vs waiting weeks for some hacked together 2.6.8294 backport.

Even if that weren't the case, between snapshotting filesystems and containerized everything, it just feels like such cautious, controlled OS software is a thing of the past.

As always, happy to be told I'm incorrect and/or hear use cases.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#116

Post by xfer »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

The target audience is the machines that host your vms, these need to have a stable environment for a long time(of course patched for security when needed).

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#117

Post by iasay »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

About 18 years ago I wrote an internal intranet application for someone in PHP (yuck). This runs one of their core business processes. Every 3 years we do a review of the system, replace the hardware and update the software. This is exactly where CentOS variants sit for me. The last two upgrade cycles, the computer has not been down at all in the interim. It has literally been up for 3 years. The only changes have been to support later versions of Postgres and PHP and to move the backups to S3 rather than tape.

Why not the cloud? The company is in a rural location with a shitty internet connection and 50 users. When initially provisioned there was no internet connection at all!

There’s a lot of stuff which is in the territory of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and that’s where these distributions sit. That may cover industrial, office, line of business apps, temporarily connected or fully offline systems. Or just stuff you don’t want to piss around with.

Also never underestimate the power of having stuff you don’t have to touch or even go near. When was the last time you got paid monthly to do something once every three years?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#118

Post by iasay »

josephcsible wrote: post #97
carwyn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This isn't my experience at all. I've personally had three paid support cases attached to Bugzilla issues. Two of them were for bugs that had one-line fixes that were already committed upstream, along with test cases, and that I just needed Red Hat to backport. They sat for about 6 months before I got any response other than the automated monthly "our engineers are working on the Bugzilla." The third was for a proble…

Same experience with RHEL support. We just didn’t bother in the end. We fix our own bugs or work around them.

CentOS/Rocky has better ROI is better when stuff doesn’t get fixed on something you are paying money for.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#119

Post by russnes »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

server machines or machines offering an installed product like an ATM or a bus schedule display

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#120

Post by kasabali »

freedomben wrote: post #41
jbverschoor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and RH doesn't have to bear much of the cost of the development of Linux, GNU, and many other products. This is the spirit of OS.. If you think that's unethical, you should find another employer ;) edit: ah.. former employee.. so that part was already done :)

> RH doesn't have to bear much of the cost of the development of Linux, GNU, and many other products. I disagree. RH is one of the top contributors to many of the major projects that make up the distro. Also the process of building/maintaining a distro is itself enormous. The 3rd parties have none of that expense so they can undercut the cost easily. In the end it hurts the whole ecosystem, while benefiting a select…

> In the end it hurts the whole ecosystem

If this hurts the whole ecosystem, all community developed distributions must have been hurting it, too, by your bizarre interpretation of free software and/or arrogant take on ethics.

Explain how anything you've said so far in this sub thread can't be summed up to "red hat good, everyone else leeches".

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