7 ms·

First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single se

by awill 6y ago

First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. I have a single server in my home running CentOS 7. I gain nothing by using RHEL over Rocky in the future, except with RHEL I have to accept ToS, do some subscription checks, and run the risk that Red Hat cancels this programme down the road. I only see this of value for someone who actually runs real RHEL in prod, and needs to test/validate hardware/software. For anyone just wanting 'free' RHEL, they should just use Rocky.

dralley 6y ago
(RH Employee) > First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. I agree. >Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements.
- arbitrage 6y ago
  yeah, stop playing games, redhat? just say what you're going to say already. i have no idea why you're trying to focus so hard on building mindshare, building a mystery around it like you're a sarah mclachlan tribute band, but you already blew it. go back to what you're good at, please.
- lucideer 6y ago
  I understand as an RH employee you're likely not in a position to make decisions about what you can disclose when, but... (I'm sure you're aware) your first answer contradicts your second.
  - dralley 6y ago
    There's no contradiction, only an acknowledgement that (in my personal opinion) the piecemeal way these plans are being announced is understandably frustrating, but that they are legitimately serious about making RHEL easier to use across a spectrum of use cases (which the official post is pretty clear about).
    - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
      It's worse than frustrating, it's damaging for Red Hat. It doesn't matter much to me anymore, I've already migrated my small business internal server that was running Centos 7 to Debian. We had basically just a fileserver, FTP box, and a couple VMs for some time clock, wiki, and building security systems, so nothing we were running yet was CentOS specific. But in case it can be useful to you, please share with your team that the writing they're putting on the wall looks pretty bad. Knowing I'd have to update eventually, I just took the safe option, which is no longer any distro controlled by Red Hat. I didn't want to leave our server in a state where we could be building dependencies on a platform that was likely to be pulled out from under us, and while RHEL isn't too expensive to just buy for one server, and we might have qualified for something free or something you've not yet announced, my test was surprisingly painless and the migration was easier than I anticipated.
      - syshum 6y ago
        I Agree 100% RedHat seems to forget the for the majority of CentOS users STABLITY was the driving factor in the choice to use CentOS. I am not sure what internal metrics they have, or if I am missing a glaring use case somewhere but from where I sit RedHat seems to completely miss the boat as to who is using CentOS in the real world. I want STABLE UNCHANGING SECURE systems, not the latest and greatest features, or some new shiny "cloudy" technology...
        ghaff 6y ago
        And yet you're not willing to pay for it.
- chasil 6y ago
  Red Hat was not expecting the reaction to killing CentOS. The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated. I don't know of any other vendor that wraps developer accounts into production licenses. Notice that this access is in no way promised to the end of support for RHEL 8. I will say again, Red Hat has terminated two major Linux platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS. Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a Linux platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. Oracle Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy. There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different. The free converters between them should be used fluidly.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated. I don't follow. Are you suggesting that RH actually didn't realize that people were running CentOS at scale in production?
    - chasil 6y ago
      I see the decision to convert to CentOS stream as driven by two motivations, cost containment, and facilitating outside contributions by pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability). I might be misreading these motivations. With this management perspective, the CentOS community reaction to the retraction of the end of life date, and potential reduction in stability, was likely not anticipated.
      - BossingAround 6y ago
        > pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability) CentOS streams is literally RHEL with fixed major version and rolling minor versions. So, in the past, you got CentOS 7.1, then 7.2, etc., with streams, you get CentOS 8.x. Saying that this is moving away from RHEL stability sounds highly disingenuous. Are you saying you've seen RHEL 7.X to break as opposed to 7.(X-1) version, and your solution was to wait for RHEL 7.(X+1)?
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements. It's a horrible way to treat users. They aren't paying customers, so whatever for RH short-term bottom line. But amount of community backslash approach like that is bringing can have negative long term impact. RH pulled the rug from under the people, and is telling them to stay tuned. I wouldn't base my infra on a system like that. But that's good for overall Linux community - RH has way too much power there.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ehayes 6y ago
I manage a "tiny company", but we have 10-ish production CentOS 7/8 servers and this sounds interesting. Although my web-app use case is probably fine with Stream, I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless.
- ziml77 6y ago
  It's not that the expectation is that it will be broken and useless. It's that the reason to choose CentOS was for the fact that it has slow release cycles which allow for long support periods.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless. It probably wont be completely broken and useless, but they replaced a stable OS with a beta, which is particularly galling to many users who picked that OS specifically because it was so stable.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Just trying to see how you define "beta"
    - awill 6y ago
      I think you're digging in the wrong place, and focusing on the label. This shouldn't be kicking fedora down. It has a place, as does stream. The point is that with CentOS you expect a super stable release. Red Hat replaced that with what is clearly a less stable project. And as was said before, if you used CentOS, it's probably precisely because you want something super stable with long term support. Those are not the sorts of users who'll want to use Stream.
    - eropple 6y ago
      To me, Fedora is a desktop environment (my preferred one!) and absolutely an alpha/early-beta server option at best. CentOS Stream seems like "Fedora, again" and does not do what CentOS did. And now, the willingness to blow up CentOS with so little warning means there is a massive trust deficit here.
pinewurst 6y ago
It's easy enough to suggest "just use Rocky" but Rocky doesn't exist beyond a collective promise. What about production now, or in the next few months?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > What about production now, or in the next few months? Pay for RHEL, use CentOS 7, or switch to Ubuntu.
  - doublerabbit 6y ago
    Or scrap all three and start using *BSD.
    - MindTooth 6y ago
      This seems more and more to be the reality we are moving towards. Been dabbling with FreeBSD lately and it just works. Also, ports are updated or new submitted quite often making it feel less out of date.
    - viraptor 6y ago
      That's not a decision you make and then train staff + switch in a short time. At least not beyond trivial deployments. People used CentOS so they don't have to deal with this and they will have other less-extreme options before CentOS EOL.
  - merlinscholz 6y ago
    Even though it sounds bad, Oracle Linux works surprisingly well
    - type0 6y ago
      It's not just that it sounds bad, you'd have to be willing to sell your soul to the devil.
arbitrage 6y ago
they didn't have this when they announced the death of centos. this is what they scrambled to come up with when they realized how much of an "oops" move messing with centos really was. as a peace offering to prevent mindshare from fleeing the redhat ecosystem, i am underwhelmed. i don't think that redhat really realizes yet how cheesed off this made a lot of people. being shrewish about money is one thing; we can deal with that (see: oracle, IBM). it's really the complete unpredictability and how arrogantly hamfisted this centos debacle was. I can put up with a lot of shit in my job, but what i especially don't like or need is more unreliable unpredictable shit.
- chasil 6y ago
  Oh, I think they know at this point. https://devops.com/centos-rebellion-against-red-hat-gains-momentum/%22 https://devops.com/centos-rebellion-against-red-hat-gains-mo... https://www.infoworld.com/article/3601202/red-hats-crime-against-centos.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3601202/red-hats-crime-aga... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-linux-is-gone-but-its-refugees-have-alternatives/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-linux-is-gone...
barryrandall 6y ago
Scientific Linux (sponsored by Fermilab) is a CentOS-like rebuild of RedHat Enterprise Linux and might also be worth a look. https://scientificlinux.org/ https://scientificlinux.org/
- alexhutcheson 6y ago
  Fermilab discontinued work on Scientific Linux in 2019 in favor of using CentOS: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE;11d6001.1904 https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX... It’s possible they could choose to restart work on Scientific Linux, but nothing has been announced yet.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    To add, Fermi and Cern released a join statement >CERN and Fermilab acknowledge the recent decision to shift focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, and the sudden change of the end of life of the CentOS 8 release. This may entail significant consequences for the worldwide particle physics community. We are currently investigating together the best path forward. We will keep you informed about any developments in this area during Q1 2021. https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/joint-cern-fermilab-statement-on-centos-linux/ https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/joint-cern-fermilab-statement-...
m463 6y ago
I suspect this is a reaction, not something planned a while back.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Yeah but they should expect reactions.
dalu 6y ago
How did redhat kill centos again?

by awill 6y ago

dralley 6y ago

(RH Employee) > First, they should have announced this when they killed CentOS. I agree. >Second, this is only of value to the teeny tiny companies and individual users with a single server in their home. Small companies with any expectation of growth should probably just use Rocky instead from the get go. Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements.

arbitrage 6y ago
yeah, stop playing games, redhat? just say what you're going to say already. i have no idea why you're trying to focus so hard on building mindshare, building a mystery around it like you're a sarah mclachlan tribute band, but you already blew it. go back to what you're good at, please.
lucideer 6y ago
I understand as an RH employee you're likely not in a position to make decisions about what you can disclose when, but... (I'm sure you're aware) your first answer contradicts your second.
- dralley 6y ago
  There's no contradiction, only an acknowledgement that (in my personal opinion) the piecemeal way these plans are being announced is understandably frustrating, but that they are legitimately serious about making RHEL easier to use across a spectrum of use cases (which the official post is pretty clear about).
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    It's worse than frustrating, it's damaging for Red Hat. It doesn't matter much to me anymore, I've already migrated my small business internal server that was running Centos 7 to Debian. We had basically just a fileserver, FTP box, and a couple VMs for some time clock, wiki, and building security systems, so nothing we were running yet was CentOS specific. But in case it can be useful to you, please share with your team that the writing they're putting on the wall looks pretty bad. Knowing I'd have to update eventually, I just took the safe option, which is no longer any distro controlled by Red Hat. I didn't want to leave our server in a state where we could be building dependencies on a platform that was likely to be pulled out from under us, and while RHEL isn't too expensive to just buy for one server, and we might have qualified for something free or something you've not yet announced, my test was surprisingly painless and the migration was easier than I anticipated.
    - syshum 6y ago
      I Agree 100% RedHat seems to forget the for the majority of CentOS users STABLITY was the driving factor in the choice to use CentOS. I am not sure what internal metrics they have, or if I am missing a glaring use case somewhere but from where I sit RedHat seems to completely miss the boat as to who is using CentOS in the real world. I want STABLE UNCHANGING SECURE systems, not the latest and greatest features, or some new shiny "cloudy" technology...
      - ghaff 6y ago
        And yet you're not willing to pay for it.
chasil 6y ago
Red Hat was not expecting the reaction to killing CentOS. The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated. I don't know of any other vendor that wraps developer accounts into production licenses. Notice that this access is in no way promised to the end of support for RHEL 8. I will say again, Red Hat has terminated two major Linux platforms over the last two decades - the original Red Hat Linux, which was terminated at v9, and now CentOS. Oracle has "somewhat" terminated a Linux platform, Oracle Linux for SPARC, which was only supported for two minor releases. Oracle Linux for ARM64 and AMD64/x86 seem reasonably healthy. There is other baggage in and between these corporations, but the track record on Linux OS platforms between these two is demonstrably different. The free converters between them should be used fluidly.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > The need to expand the developer program into production seats could not have been anticipated. I don't follow. Are you suggesting that RH actually didn't realize that people were running CentOS at scale in production?
  - chasil 6y ago
    I see the decision to convert to CentOS stream as driven by two motivations, cost containment, and facilitating outside contributions by pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability). I might be misreading these motivations. With this management perspective, the CentOS community reaction to the retraction of the end of life date, and potential reduction in stability, was likely not anticipated.
    - BossingAround 6y ago
      > pushing CentOS towards Fedora (and away from RHEL stability) CentOS streams is literally RHEL with fixed major version and rolling minor versions. So, in the past, you got CentOS 7.1, then 7.2, etc., with streams, you get CentOS 8.x. Saying that this is moving away from RHEL stability sounds highly disingenuous. Are you saying you've seen RHEL 7.X to break as opposed to 7.(X-1) version, and your solution was to wait for RHEL 7.(X+1)?
justapassenger 6y ago
> Without saying too much - stay tuned for further announcements. It's a horrible way to treat users. They aren't paying customers, so whatever for RH short-term bottom line. But amount of community backslash approach like that is bringing can have negative long term impact. RH pulled the rug from under the people, and is telling them to stay tuned. I wouldn't base my infra on a system like that. But that's good for overall Linux community - RH has way too much power there.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

ehayes 6y ago

I manage a "tiny company", but we have 10-ish production CentOS 7/8 servers and this sounds interesting. Although my web-app use case is probably fine with Stream, I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless.

ziml77 6y ago
It's not that the expectation is that it will be broken and useless. It's that the reason to choose CentOS was for the fact that it has slow release cycles which allow for long support periods.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> I don't know why everyone is assuming Stream will be completely broken and useless. It probably wont be completely broken and useless, but they replaced a stable OS with a beta, which is particularly galling to many users who picked that OS specifically because it was so stable.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Curious, do you consider Fedora to be an alpha? Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously? Just trying to see how you define "beta"
  - awill 6y ago
    I think you're digging in the wrong place, and focusing on the label. This shouldn't be kicking fedora down. It has a place, as does stream. The point is that with CentOS you expect a super stable release. Red Hat replaced that with what is clearly a less stable project. And as was said before, if you used CentOS, it's probably precisely because you want something super stable with long term support. Those are not the sorts of users who'll want to use Stream.
  - eropple 6y ago
    To me, Fedora is a desktop environment (my preferred one!) and absolutely an alpha/early-beta server option at best. CentOS Stream seems like "Fedora, again" and does not do what CentOS did. And now, the willingness to blow up CentOS with so little warning means there is a massive trust deficit here.

pinewurst 6y ago

It's easy enough to suggest "just use Rocky" but Rocky doesn't exist beyond a collective promise. What about production now, or in the next few months?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> What about production now, or in the next few months? Pay for RHEL, use CentOS 7, or switch to Ubuntu.
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Or scrap all three and start using *BSD.
  - MindTooth 6y ago
    This seems more and more to be the reality we are moving towards. Been dabbling with FreeBSD lately and it just works. Also, ports are updated or new submitted quite often making it feel less out of date.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    That's not a decision you make and then train staff + switch in a short time. At least not beyond trivial deployments. People used CentOS so they don't have to deal with this and they will have other less-extreme options before CentOS EOL.
- merlinscholz 6y ago
  Even though it sounds bad, Oracle Linux works surprisingly well
  - type0 6y ago
    It's not just that it sounds bad, you'd have to be willing to sell your soul to the devil.

arbitrage 6y ago

they didn't have this when they announced the death of centos. this is what they scrambled to come up with when they realized how much of an "oops" move messing with centos really was. as a peace offering to prevent mindshare from fleeing the redhat ecosystem, i am underwhelmed. i don't think that redhat really realizes yet how cheesed off this made a lot of people. being shrewish about money is one thing; we can deal with that (see: oracle, IBM). it's really the complete unpredictability and how arrogantly hamfisted this centos debacle was. I can put up with a lot of shit in my job, but what i especially don't like or need is more unreliable unpredictable shit.

chasil 6y ago
Oh, I think they know at this point. https://devops.com/centos-rebellion-against-red-hat-gains-momentum/%22 https://devops.com/centos-rebellion-against-red-hat-gains-mo... https://www.infoworld.com/article/3601202/red-hats-crime-against-centos.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/3601202/red-hats-crime-aga... https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-linux-is-gone-but-its-refugees-have-alternatives/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-linux-is-gone...

barryrandall 6y ago

Scientific Linux (sponsored by Fermilab) is a CentOS-like rebuild of RedHat Enterprise Linux and might also be worth a look. https://scientificlinux.org/ https://scientificlinux.org/

alexhutcheson 6y ago
Fermilab discontinued work on Scientific Linux in 2019 in favor of using CentOS: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE;11d6001.1904 https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX... It’s possible they could choose to restart work on Scientific Linux, but nothing has been announced yet.
- _-david-_ 6y ago
  To add, Fermi and Cern released a join statement >CERN and Fermilab acknowledge the recent decision to shift focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, and the sudden change of the end of life of the CentOS 8 release. This may entail significant consequences for the worldwide particle physics community. We are currently investigating together the best path forward. We will keep you informed about any developments in this area during Q1 2021. https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/joint-cern-fermilab-statement-on-centos-linux/ https://news.fnal.gov/2020/12/joint-cern-fermilab-statement-...

m463 6y ago

I suspect this is a reaction, not something planned a while back.

fomine3 6y ago
Yeah but they should expect reactions.

dalu 6y ago

How did redhat kill centos again?