Live data from Hacker News

Centos.rip

centos.rip

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: Centos.rip

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two totally different markets. RHEL (and its free clone, CentOS, rip) are for regulated industries or anyone who values extreme stability over any newness. You can turn updates on and feel as safe as you can be against known exploits while at the same time feeling as confident as you can that your stuff won’t break. Once or twice a decade, you port to a new version and then go back to not thinking about it too much.

I feel confident about this with Alpine Linux. It doesn't have this sense of newness and bleeding edge. It is extremely stable and I have run upgrades on it for years without even a single issue. They release twice annually and the upgrade process is almost trivial. Keeping up with it is easy and a good practice for any organization.

I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be there to handle these issues. They’re thinking like a hospital that can’t risk downtime and is not a software company, even if they hire a few engineers here and there.

Re: Centos.rip

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel confident about this with Alpine Linux. It doesn't have this sense of newness and bleeding edge. It is extremely stable and I have run upgrades on it for years without even a single issue. They release twice annually and the upgrade process is almost trivial. Keeping up with it is easy and a good practice for any organization.

I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be…

Don't make me repeat myself with respect to new features and stability.

Re: Centos.rip

#123
post #76

Being out of touch from the Linux distro world, this is rather sudden. I still run CentOS on many of my dedicated servers (now known as bare-metal) from a decade ago. While almost everything else was all custom-built anyways, I guess the lack of core updates is going to be a problem. Though, CentOS 6 was going to reach EOL soon anyways.

Soon as in over week ago (November 30th), just FYI.

Re: Centos.rip

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be…

Don't make me repeat myself with respect to new features and stability.

You dismiss, elsewhere in this thread, the need to be on the same OS and package versions for years. That’s what people want sometimes. They don’t want to tinker with the system. They don’t need any new functionality, not this year, not next year, not in five years. They built a service, it works, and they can deploy to RHEL and (mostly) forget about it for a long time. As the end of the LTS period approaches, they can do the work to migrate and then forget about it again for a decade. Note that “they” is not just the organization running the system, but also the vendors of bespoke or otherwise niche software used by the organization. Any problem might mean getting billed big bucks per hour of engineering work.

Re: Centos.rip

#125
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I have not seen crashes, but I often saw corrupted DPKG databases. This is very rare if you stick to upstream repositories, but it gets more serious when you start mixing third-party repositories in (i.e. I saw people replacing GCC with newer versions from outside repositories, and due to the sheer amount of stuff depending from it, doing a dist-upgrade required purging an immense amount of packages). I must admit it's not usually an issue on servers, though.

Re: Centos.rip

#126
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,

You can check out SUSE. Depending what you do, maybe go with FreeBSD instead linux.

Re: Centos.rip

#127
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,

Why not Debian? I've always used either Debian or Gentoo, depending on what I'm doing. I know Gentoo isn't everyones cup of tea, but Debian seems similar enough to Centos in my eyes.

EDIT: Reading elsewhere in the thread, the answer seems to be “enterprise”, which I consider something to be actively avoided.

Re: Centos.rip

#128
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending what exactly you want, CentOS is still a great choice, especially if you are also using the machine for more than set serving jobs. My understanding is, that CentOS will be exactly in the middle ground between Fedora and Red Hat. So it will be ahead of Red Hat a bit, which is a good thing if you want more current software versions. But not quite as cutting edge as Fedora. Personally, I am fully on Fedora fo…

>My understanding is, that CentOS will be exactly in the middle ground between Fedora and Red Hat. Not "exactly the middle ground", so much as Fedora ---------------------------------------->> CentOS Stream -->> RHEL At any given time CentOS Stream is only a couple months ahead of RHEL, that is not remotely true for Fedora.

Thanks, that means even more it still is a good choice for people who are more oriented towards the stable RHEL.

Re: Centos.rip

#129
post #23

My existential dread about this is worsened when I read suggestions that the best possible alternative is Oracle Linux...

Ubuntu has been fine for us. We just jump from one LTS to the next.

How long do you normally wait after an LTS release to start shifting?

Re: Centos.rip

#130

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 mix…

> 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.

And the reverse is even more true: If your app worked on RHEL 5, you can probably blindly copy it to an EL 7 box and it will just work (ask me how I know;]), and probably it would for EL 8, too.

Post reply on HN