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Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#271

Post by effie »

unethical_ban wrote: post #185
NotHereNotThere wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I'll bite.. How would I run our SAP ERP apps/databases without "running servers that long"?

Of course there are use cases, but _ideally_, most workloads are staged, deployed, and backed up in such a way that it is a documented, reproducible procedure to tear down an instance of a server, rebuild, and redeploy services. And while it may be cumbersome or cause some downtime or headaches if that isn't the case, I find the very need of doing it once every 1-3 years forces your hand to get your shit together, ra…

How many simultaneously running machines can you keep updating with this method? If you run non-trivial workloads for hundreds of customers, this becomes high maintenance system already with two machines. It takes ages to upgrade all applications, then validate everything works, then actually migrate with no downtime.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#272

Post by circularfoyers »

thr0w3345 wrote: post #253
CivBase wrote: post #248

I knew what CentOS was, but never followed it because I've never personally had use for it. Still, I appreciate what it did and was glad to have it as an option should I ever need a super stable distro in the future. That said, I think the FAQ is missing an answer for a critical question: What ultimately drove CentOS to its regrettable fate and what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?

Redhat acquired it, then ibm acequired redhat and then game over.

There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that this decision was influenced by IBM (correlation doesn't equal causation).

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#273

Post by smnrchrds »

Alupis wrote: post #270

> The CentOS project recently announced a shift in strategy for CentOS. Whereas previously CentOS existed as a downstream build of its upstream vendor (it receives patches and updates after the upstream vendor does), it will be shifting to an upstream build (testing patches and updates before inclusion in the upstream vendor. Wow, I haven't been following this very closely - but isn't that Fedora they're describing?…

Fedora is desktop-focused. RHEL and CentOS are server-focused. I think there is a place for both. But who knows, maybe IBM will discontinue one, or both.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#274

Post by uep »

tmoravec wrote: post #16
mmrezaie wrote: post #3

I am really interested to know why should anyone go with this when Debian or Ubuntu LTS exist. The two later have not changed their policies in the last decade, and they have a clear path for upgrading. CentOS was always a clear choice for device drivers support, but I never understood the stability claims.

Debian offers around three years of support. Ubuntu LTS around five. Both pale in comparison with Red Hat and, by proxy, CentOS.

Do you know something I don't? A few years back, Debian changed their LTS policy to 5 years in response to Ubuntu.

> Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.

> Thus the Debian LTS team takes over security maintenance of the various releases once the Debian Security team stops its work.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#275

Post by syshum »

nickysielicki wrote: post #260
teknopaul wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM. Rocky will not be be IBM.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Redhat was making a profit before IBM bought them. They had existed for 20 some years on a business model that business people didn’t understand, and they were able to do that because they understood what open source would become and how they could play a role in that. One of the things that YC is always talking about is that founders looking for ideas should look to iden…

No the most frustrating part is all the Red Hat employees attempting

1. Claim "IBM has no influence, this was all our own independent action, honest, believe use guys....

2. Red Hat employees instance that "CentOS 8 was never officially supported until 2029 so we did not go back on anything"

if people believe either of those I really need to get in real estate and start selling bridges

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#276

Post by effie »

NDizzle wrote: post #123
Karunamon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My read on that is that you should be treating your servers as disposable and ephemeral as possible. Long uptimes mean configuration drift, general snowflakery, difficulties patching, patches getting delayed/not done, and so forth. Ideally you'd never upgrade your software in the usual way. You'd simply deploy the new version with automated tooling and tear down the older.

"Ideally" - that's the problem. I have half a dozen long tail side projects running right now on Centos 7, and a few still on Centos 6. Do you have any idea how much effort it is to change everything over to "treating your servers as disposable"?! It's going to eat up a third (to half) of my "fun time" budget for the foreseeable future!

Exactly, young devs here are completely out of touch with operations. Of course ideally something like standard 1TB HDD+32GB RAM system would be upgraded to newer OS and apps version by a central tool in 2hours, but we don't such FM technology yet.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#277

Post by CoolGuySteve »

bonzini wrote: post #174
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The patch delta for security fixes must get larger over time as these packages age further and further away from top of tree. I always wonder how many major vulnerabilities are introduced into these super old distros due to backporting bugs.

It's the opposite. Plenty of subsystems in the RHEL 8.3 kernel are basically on par with upstream 5.5 or so, as almost all the patches are backported. The source code is really the same to a large extent, and therefore security fixes apply straightforwardly.

That's great but what about all the other packages?

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#278

Post by bayindirh »

Alupis wrote: post #270

> The CentOS project recently announced a shift in strategy for CentOS. Whereas previously CentOS existed as a downstream build of its upstream vendor (it receives patches and updates after the upstream vendor does), it will be shifting to an upstream build (testing patches and updates before inclusion in the upstream vendor. Wow, I haven't been following this very closely - but isn't that Fedora they're describing?…

> Is Fedora going away too?

Nope.

  - Fedora is cutting edge/desktop.
  - CentOS Stream is testing/RC area for RHEL patches.
  - RHEL is the stable server for enterprise.
This is what I understood from a reply to another comment of me in a similar thread.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#279

Post by basilgohar »

igotroot wrote: post #225

Looking forward to give this a spin at home to see if it'll be the future of non-RH based linux servers, although it'll take a long time before people are willing to throw it in prod like they do with CentOS. No way to change that except time. Also it's interesting that some people defined Rocky as being 'unstable' when others read it as being 'solid as a rock'.

But it is a RH-based – it's just like CentOS used to be. It's just not owned nor operated by RH.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#280

Post by LinuxBender »

smnrchrds wrote: post #273
Alupis wrote: post #270

> The CentOS project recently announced a shift in strategy for CentOS. Whereas previously CentOS existed as a downstream build of its upstream vendor (it receives patches and updates after the upstream vendor does), it will be shifting to an upstream build (testing patches and updates before inclusion in the upstream vendor. Wow, I haven't been following this very closely - but isn't that Fedora they're describing?…

Fedora is desktop-focused. RHEL and CentOS are server-focused. I think there is a place for both. But who knows, maybe IBM will discontinue one, or both.

RHEL and CentOS are both server and desktop. The desktop is just not flashy or shiny or bleeding edge. The default install is/was Gnome 3 shell (For RHEL7 and CentOS 7).

I am not sure if this is still the case, but Redhat used to require 100% of its employees to use RHEL Workstation as the desktop.

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