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Oh, wow. My whole extended family has CentOS on their machines for years because of LTS. Not sure what I'm going to replace it with now and how. Perhaps there's

Oh, wow. My whole extended family has CentOS on their machines for years because of LTS. Not sure what I'm going to replace it with now and how. Perhaps there's going to be Fedora LTS at some point soon. I sure hope Fedora is not the next casualty. IBM strikes again.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
Your whole family runs CentOS as their desktop operating system?
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  Extended yes. And has been for years without a single issue. Immediate family all on Fedora. Very little maintenance, automated updates. Desktop software installed through flatpaks. Easy remote management. Users don't care about the OS as long as they know how to open the browser, email, word processor, Skype, Zoom, etc.
  - AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
    Fair enough, was just confirming. It didn't occur to me that flatpaks would probably assist in bridging the gap between a "Workstation" OS and a conventional end-user OS where yum repos and EPEL might be lacking. > Easy remote management. Just out of curiousity, are you SSHing in directly, or installing the Teamviewer RPM on all of them?
    - FeistySkink 6y ago
      Each house has an single always-on VPN client (RPi) to the central server so I ssh in case something is up. Pretty much never happens, but it's good to know the option is there. Most issues are with a specific software and not the OS, so I need to have a visual to help resolve, e.g. "Where is my contact list in Viber?" or "Why do I see this page?". Plus, I'm running Pi-Hole in docker and I ssh to upgrade it from time to time, (docker pull, docker-compose down/up, etc.). I haven't bothered automating this because some things change between releases and I still end up doing manual configuration changes.
mattdm 6y ago
I'm a little confused by this. Well, first, I'd encourage you to try Fedora Workstation for your family -- we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option). But second, if a "Fedora LTS" would fit your needs, why not give CentOS Stream a look? It's not actually going to be that different from CentOS Linux, and almost certainly will have less constant change than a theoretical Fedora LTS would. Also, I am not one of the highest upptity-ups in the company or anything, but from the inside: I see no evidence whatsoever that this is the result of IBM anything.
- FeistySkink 6y ago
  Thank you for the reply. While I personally never had a single issue with upgrading between Fedora releases, I also have the skills the resolve any potential ones if I would. I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. So far CentOS fit that niche beautifully, with seldom major clean reinstalls (i.e. wipe root) when I'm there (7.x > 8.x). I'm going to evaluate CentOS Stream and perhaps you are right and it's a viable replacement.
  - danieldk 6y ago
    I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. Fedora Silverblue could be interesting alternative to regular Fedora then, since you can boot into or roll back to a previous release. You can also pin a known-good OSTree commit, so that one could always boot that version.
    - Iolaum 6y ago
      This. Although I 'd suggest running Silverblue in a VM first to learn about package layering and flatpaks. (This was my migration path. Made sure all my use cases were working within the VM before I installed on bare metal.)
  - BenjiWiebe 6y ago

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

Your whole family runs CentOS as their desktop operating system?

FeistySkink 6y ago
Extended yes. And has been for years without a single issue. Immediate family all on Fedora. Very little maintenance, automated updates. Desktop software installed through flatpaks. Easy remote management. Users don't care about the OS as long as they know how to open the browser, email, word processor, Skype, Zoom, etc.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
  Fair enough, was just confirming. It didn't occur to me that flatpaks would probably assist in bridging the gap between a "Workstation" OS and a conventional end-user OS where yum repos and EPEL might be lacking. > Easy remote management. Just out of curiousity, are you SSHing in directly, or installing the Teamviewer RPM on all of them?
  - FeistySkink 6y ago
    Each house has an single always-on VPN client (RPi) to the central server so I ssh in case something is up. Pretty much never happens, but it's good to know the option is there. Most issues are with a specific software and not the OS, so I need to have a visual to help resolve, e.g. "Where is my contact list in Viber?" or "Why do I see this page?". Plus, I'm running Pi-Hole in docker and I ssh to upgrade it from time to time, (docker pull, docker-compose down/up, etc.). I haven't bothered automating this because some things change between releases and I still end up doing manual configuration changes.

mattdm 6y ago

I'm a little confused by this. Well, first, I'd encourage you to try Fedora Workstation for your family -- we've worked on making upgrades painless, so that they're basically an automated thing that happens while you go for coffee once or twice a year (at your option). But second, if a "Fedora LTS" would fit your needs, why not give CentOS Stream a look? It's not actually going to be that different from CentOS Linux, and almost certainly will have less constant change than a theoretical Fedora LTS would. Also, I am not one of the highest upptity-ups in the company or anything, but from the inside: I see no evidence whatsoever that this is the result of IBM anything.

FeistySkink 6y ago
Thank you for the reply. While I personally never had a single issue with upgrading between Fedora releases, I also have the skills the resolve any potential ones if I would. I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. So far CentOS fit that niche beautifully, with seldom major clean reinstalls (i.e. wipe root) when I'm there (7.x > 8.x). I'm going to evaluate CentOS Stream and perhaps you are right and it's a viable replacement.
- danieldk 6y ago
  I don't want to deal with somebody's computer suddenly being borked halfway across the world with no way to assist. Fedora Silverblue could be interesting alternative to regular Fedora then, since you can boot into or roll back to a previous release. You can also pin a known-good OSTree commit, so that one could always boot that version.
  - Iolaum 6y ago
    This. Although I 'd suggest running Silverblue in a VM first to learn about package layering and flatpaks. (This was my migration path. Made sure all my use cases were working within the VM before I installed on bare metal.)
- BenjiWiebe 6y ago