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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

#471

Post by freiheit »

kondbg wrote: post #179

Devil's advocate: why should I choose this yet-to-exist distribution over something already existing, such as Oracle Linux? The most common argument (Oracle is evil and litigious. Therefore, using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued) honestly seems like FUD. All RHEL downstream distributions rebuild the same SRPMs that RHEL provides. Doing a quick comparison over some common packages (kernel, httpd, openssl, et…

I haven't seen "using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued".

What I've seen is "Oracle is evil", "don't trust Oracle", and something like "my prior history around Oracle has left such a lasting bad taste that I throw up a little in my mouth every time I touch something with Oracle in it, so I'd rather do almost anything but use something from Oracle, since using it on the daily would inevitably lead to permanent esophagus damage."

I mean... Oracle buying up MySQL was enough for MariaDB to be created and move to being the default. (well, and some of what Oracle did right afterwards).

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

#472

Post by filmgirlcw »

Shared404 wrote: post #442
Shared404 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, with the way things are going, I would like them to deemphasize the desktop. Canonical made it easy to recommend linux as a desktop, but then have made it harder as time goes on, with controversies like Snap and the Amazon fiasco. I'm glad for what they have done, and wish them luck in the server space. There are others who are now better positioned to pick up where Canonical left off on the desktop. Elemen…

Outside of the edit window for the above comment, but Mint needs to go in the list of distributions that are moving the desktop forward.

I agree with you on those projects and Mint, my only response is that they are all much smaller projects that lack the funding and size/force of will that Ubuntu was able to achieve. That isn’t to take away from them at all, but aside from System 76 (a boutique reseller who until recently has primarily just sold re-badged Taiwanese laptops (good laptops to be sure, Clevo is a solid ODM), most of them are either largely community projects or very nascent businesses with a few full-time employees.

Again, that isn’t a criticism — I’m friends with some members of the elementary team and absolutely love what they do — truly. But none of those projects can make the type of investment that Canonical did or that the other big Linux vendors who have all but abandoned the desktop (SuSE/Novell, Red Hat) did, or even now-bankrupt/sold for pennies to PE companies did (Mandriva (née Mandrake), Corel, Linspire (remember those crooks!)) or that some promised to do, but later abandoned (Steam).

Maybe that’s OK. Maybe the number of Linux desktop users is content with work being done and sustained largely by community volunteers or very small companies. But as good as the work many of those groups do is, I do think the lack of a Canonical type of company does hurt the whole ecosystems ability to grow, innovate, and reliably attract new users. On a personal level, I think that everyone should give up the pretense of Linux on the desktop ever evolving beyond an extremely niche thing, and be content that the Linux kernel is at least the basis for stuff like ChromeOS and Android (which while absolutely not Linux on the desktop or on mobile, are at least major desktop platforms), but that’s just me.

Deepin is interesting because it has a strong source of funding and developers/partners and has made really great moves on the UI front and it’s partnerships with ZTE and Huawei (Huawei even ships Deepin on many of its machines now). My personal concern with Deepin is the security and privacy with it — and I have those same concerns for any state-sponsored version of Linux or any operating system to be honest. Deepin is also very insular in its development (far more than even Ubuntu), and that might just be necessary to achieve the sort of polish it has, but that distinct lack of community could be a turn-off to many.

What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily disagree with your assertion that Canonical should pull out from the desktop even more, but I think a lot of people underestimate just how big of a void that will leave in the desktop space and as good as those projects you mentioned are, I don’t think any of them individually or collectively can fill it. Especially financially.

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

#473

Post by em500 »

evol262 wrote: post #334
em500 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's a bit too obvious to spell it out, but 1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones. It would be trivial to just put the actual RHEL8 iso as an unsupported download on their ftp/www server and sell the support separately, like Oracle or Canonical do. Instead, they kept this ridiculous make work project called CentOS around, that involved non-trivial manual labor me…

> 1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones. It would be trivial to just put the actual RHEL8 iso as an unsupported download on their ftp/www server and sell the support separately, like Oracle or Canonical do. Instead, they kept this ridiculous make work project called CentOS around, that involved non-trivial manual labor meticulously rebranding RHEL into RedHat owned Cen…

> But [they do](https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download). A subscription buys you updates and support. RHEL itself is free.

That's true in a literal-but-useless sense. Developers-RHEL might be bit-identical to real-RHEL at some dates, but as a product it's of course very very different due to lack of interim updates. And that's aside of the smaller speedbumps of registration and having to involve Legal if you want to run in a company.

> In addition, considering that almost all of Red Hat's products are "upstream first", branding is generally a single additional RPM which changes some colors. It is _not_ hard to rebrand RHEL. [...] The "expensive" part of building an EL8 clone is standing up a bunch of Koji builders. That isn't necessary either, strictly. It just makes "turn this SRPM into an RPM and combine it with a bunch of others into a temporary repo we can dogfood/release" easier. As always, it comes down to cost.

I don't know how true that is, the CentOS wiki makes it sound like like the debranding part is non-trivial/manual labour intensive. So according to you the main bottleneck is hardware / buildservers? If that's true, one wonders why even the minor CentOS 8.x releases lag RHEL 8.x by 4 to 6 weeks.

I guess we'll get to see it soon, with Rocky Linux development.

> The problem with this, broadly, is that the "community" is comprised of a lot of Red Hat-employed engineers. This idea that Linux is a bunch of "community" people that RH/IBM/whomever siphon off is completely fallacious. [...]

Sure, I largely believe the long-running narrative that a lot of core Linux development is paid/done by Red Hat, and that most other distros, including Debian/Ubuntu are free-riding to some extend. That's why I not really behind the cheering for Rocky, and think it's fairer in the end to either pay up, or roll up the sleeves and do a real _community_ enterprise OS based on Debian instead of cloning RHEL.

> What customers values is indemnity and the ability to point their finger at someone external, plus normal stuff like a security response team and responsible+timely disclosure during major CVEs.

The first part might be true of RHEL customers, but I don't think it's true for CentOS customers. The customer base is of course diverse, but my guess is that for a very large part of the (CentOS, not RHEL) users, objections to moving to Debian/Ubuntu are practical (legacy/switching costs, maybe followed by maybe proprietary software support), much more than principled/legal.

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

#474

Post by undecisive »

kondbg wrote: post #179

Devil's advocate: why should I choose this yet-to-exist distribution over something already existing, such as Oracle Linux? The most common argument (Oracle is evil and litigious. Therefore, using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued) honestly seems like FUD. All RHEL downstream distributions rebuild the same SRPMs that RHEL provides. Doing a quick comparison over some common packages (kernel, httpd, openssl, et…

I find it interesting that the argument that "X is FUD" is supposed to carry weight.

It's a bit like if I'm in a party, and I briskly walk up to five people and each time I hit them in the face, and then it's your turn and you move away, and I say "what? the idea that I would hit you is FUD".

It's not FUD. It's a pattern of behaviour.

Avoiding overly litigious companies - where other as-good or better choices exist - is not overly cautious, it's just good sense. Where other as-good choices do not exist, it seems perfectly reasonable (depending on your risk profile) to work with others to create the better choice.

Of course, I say all this as someone who has worked in massive multinational corporations and now work in small startups. I'm now likely never going to use Rocky Linux for exactly the reason you've hinted to - in effect, it is not a usecase either of us care about. But for those people who do need this, I'm very happy that someone has championed the cause.

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

#475

Post by AntiImperialist »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #26
AntiImperialist wrote: post #13

I doubt how successful this will turn out to be because of the following reasons: - The old CentOS had a brand value, which Rocky Linux has to earn back all over again. - The old Red Hat was nice to CentOS or at least wasn't particularly hostile. That does not mean IBM will be nice too. - It may be too short a notice for current CentOS users to wait for Rocky Linux to come through. They may already move away to other…

CentOS had no "brand value" when it was new. Red Hat was not nice to CentOS when it was new. The "same fate" as CentOS would mean surviving for 16 years.

When CentOS came about, Debian and Ubuntu were not serious competitors. Neither were Arch or openSUSE. There was no Amazon Linux either.

Now, mature and much more popular alternatives have well established brand value.

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

#476

Post by oefrha »

commandertso wrote: post #409

One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.

When I was at Princeton, a lot of clusters ran Springdale Linux[1], which is a Princeton/IAS version of RHEL compiled from RHEL source. I wonder why they didn't simply choose CentOS, and if there's any institution outside Princeton using Springdale.

Btw: it doesn't seem to have been ported to RHEL 8 (?).

[1] http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

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

#477

Post by bengale »

ksec wrote: post #426
wfuser wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.

"Thinking back to early CentOS days... My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you...Rocky Linux" — Gregory Kurtzer, Founder I am not even sure what is going on. 1. The Name has a meaning. As shown in the quote above. And it is tribute / honour to a founder, from a previously well known project ( CentOS ) 2. T…

> They didn't actually click on the link and read anything

Bingo.

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

#478

Post by joana035 »

bigbubba wrote: post #393
p1necone wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better put the effort into an extra-stable-extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu I've always thought of Debian LTS as basically the end all be all of Linux server OS stability (let's ignore the BSDs for this exercise), is the main draw of CentOS over that just the longer LTS period or is it also meaningfully more stable?

From what I understand, it's not just a matter of longer support, but also training. A lot of companies have/had mixed RHEL/CentOS environments, with RHEL on the machines they really want RH support for and CentOS on everything else to save money. Having a mixed RHEL/Debian environment would probably be a pain in the ass for all your sysadmins.

Not really, I have seen CentOS based infrastructure having more problems (xfs breaking docker, frankenkernel 3.10 in 2020?) whereas with Debian things just works and are not heavily patched to the point of breaking ABI.

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

#479

Post by tannhaeuser »

I wish RL all the best, but I'm glad I switched to debian-stable for server workloads (mostly Docker anyway). If anything, the story of CentOS (and White Box Linux before that) tells me a RedHat clone isn't a feasible project economically in the long run. So it may be better to put your money where your mouth is. Of my customers, none had used CentOS/RH as base image for Docker builds anyway.

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

#480

Post by Tom4hawk »

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.

So, why is RHEL not using the upstream kernel? It would allow them to avoid those issues with rust&go (and probably other software): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25447752
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