Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this still true after the IBM acquisition?
There's been absolutely no change for most employees after the acquisition.
Awesome to hear!
Rocky Linux 9.0
141–150 of 178 posts
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#142Earlier 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…
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.
Yes, IBM/Redhat decided to make CentOS less attractive to those who need a RHEL work alike. This was done on very short notice, leaving people with the uncomfortable decision to A) pay for RHEL B) tolerate a rolling release (not directly related to RHEL 8 or C) switch to another OS.
Rocky and Alma popped up for folks that want a bug for bug compatible RHEL OS.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#143Why 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 t…
I've setup 100s of PXE boot servers, including CentOS, Rocky, and Ubuntu over the last 10 years or so. I've not noticed any difference between RHEL derived and Debian derived. On the redhat side they are called kickstart files, and on the debian side pre-seed. Both are a bit wonky and hard to debug before you have a full boot, but both seem to work fine.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fo…
> 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.
Just wanted to clarify, I agree with you completely. I didn't anywhere perpetuate the unfair "it's just produce rebranded RPMs" (which is actually accurate, but trivializes the significant process involved in rebranding and rebuilding, hence IMO misleading). It's a significant amount of work. The time it takes is not unreasonable given the effort involved. That said, the amount of time was painful. I've never complained about it because I'm grateful for anything and everything they do, and I'm not complaining about it now. I'm recognizing the facts around speed of delivery, but in no way suggesting they aren't for a good reason.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sorry for the late reply. based on your username I suspect we are kindred spirits :-D
by 2024, for things still in service I will most likely upgrade it to CentOS Stream 9. by about that time I'm usually running in to annoying things about the older OS and I want updated tools and such, which is enough incentive to get the rebuild done.
The box that will be extremely hard to rebuild I already moved to Alma, where it will stay hopefully until EOL. There is one box I moved to Stream that I may just move to Alma to squeeze a few more years out of it in anticipation of it retiring. Overall though I really hate being on extended support (past the initial period). The farther in it gets the more headaches pop up. I got hosed by deprecations of SSL and old boxes that suddenly stopped working (because they were using protocols deemed too old/insecure by modern browsers). That was an absolute nightmare because it was instant prod outage and we had no time to plan.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 R…
Yeah, that's fine. On the other hand, giving discounts for Linux just because you make a buttload of money from a certain database...
I've been trying to avoid saying their name, but yes, this is the main offender I've had in mind the whole time
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, the decision to kill CentOS was entirely Red Hat's. The self-appointed 'community managers' decided that the community didn't actually want CentOS, they wanted a free version of RHEL-Beta called "CentOS Stream."
Nobody said it was a community choice. Red Hat's own layered products (OKD, RDO, oVirt) needed to be based on a distribution that leads RHEL rather than one that trails it, and that's why CentOS Stream was born. Dropping CentOS Linux was a completely different thing and one should also acknowledge that there are two very different parts of the CentOS community. Those that simply needed a free RHEL, didn't have any be…
> CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world.
There really wasn't a CentOS world beyond that, because it wasn't a true community distribution. Red Hat never attempted to meaningful involve the community, all board members or whatever pretend org CentOS has are RH employees. There were never any kind of community elections or anything of the sort.
Red Hat killed CentOS.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM had nothing to do with the CentOS decision. It was long time Red Hat people who made the decision. I don't agree with everything about the decision, but I don't think it's as bad as most people say it is[1]. You are definitely right that RH has pushed things in their own interest, but if those things don't offer value to the broader community, then the community won't adopt them. Red Hat can't force Debian or Ubu…
> I don't agree with everything about the decision, but I don't think it's as bad as most people say it is[1]. It was bad because when I chose CentOS for servers at work I thought I could count on letting them live their lives for about 10 years without worrying about them. I have a lot of things to do and taking care of those servers is a very low priority. Thank God there was a script to convert my CentOSes to Rock…
Yes I will 100% grant on that one. Pulling the plug so early on CentOS was low and I don't think they should have done that.
The whole "we never put an EOL date on it" excuse was really weak. It looks to nearly everyone like just an unintentional omission, not a legal hedge. It ended up working out well like you said thanks to Alma and Rocky, but the panic and uncertainty it caused was wholly unnecessary.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#149Earlier 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…
Out of curiosity, what sort of problems would customers typically run into? My very naive understanding is that it’s just the OS and then only even a distribution (just to emphasize- very naive), what would they need apart from some networking and to run some software on top that needs so much support?
It really runs the gamut, from bugs in included software to "why are we dropping packets" (usually misconfiguration) to an update broke our existing config or an update failed to install, etc. I saw one ticket that was "missing build dependencies" where they couldn't build their own code because of a package difference, and while Red Hat didn't fix their code, they did give them some helpful pointers.
Re: Rocky Linux 9.0
#150Earlier 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…
Your notion of ethics is unequivocally and objectively wrong. Red Hat derives massive value up to and including its very existence and every single penny that passes through its hands from participation in the larger open source ecosystem that comes with the obligation to share their work not only with random bob hacker but with people like Rocky Linux, Alma, and even folks like Oracle. You cannot acknowledge that th…
You have set up a terrifically easy strawman to knock down[1]. Nice job. But you are "unequivocally and objectively wrong" about what I think.