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I fail to see how moving to a rolling release strategy results in any kind of "death", seems like FUD to me. Rolling release, trying to stick to upstream releas

I fail to see how moving to a rolling release strategy results in any kind of "death", seems like FUD to me. Rolling release, trying to stick to upstream releases as closely as possible, works well with Arch Linux, I'm glad CentOS learned from Arch Linux success. DISCLAMER: I'm not even a CentOS user, but I just like what RH does and has done for "the Linux community" as you call it (I would just call it "society" but whatever). “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite

IceWreck 5y ago
CentOS is doing nothing like Arch. CentOS rolling release will still be so slow that itll lag a lot behind Fedora. Its just that CentOS will now be afew months ahead of RHEL instead of afew months behind RHEL.
- jcelerier 5y ago
  eh, honestly centos is one of the few distros where you can get fairly recent compilers even on old versions, much more easily than ubuntus / debians. e.g. even on centos 7 (released in 2009)
kingosticks 5y ago
For many, the reason to use CentOS was that it was stable and supported for 10 years. They killed that and personally I agree with the GP that they have probably killed CentOS along with it. CentOS Stream is "positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL". I'm not sure who this will appeal to but it's not the same group as before.
- roody15 5y ago
  Exactly midstream between Fedora and RHEL. Who is this target audience exactly ... agree completely was not the same audience that used CentOS.
  - dralley 5y ago
    CentOS Stream is getting the exact same types of updates that it got before, just incrementally rather than bundled up into minor releases every 6 months. The chart looks more like this: Fedora ---------------------------------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL It's definitely not "exactly midstream".
- jamespo 5y ago
  Stable, supported and didn't cost anything
mort96 5y ago
It's semantically correct. CentOS is the name of a Linux distribution, and that Linux distribution is dead. CentOS 8 is the last ever version of CentOS, and it's supported for for 8 more months. There's a new Linux distribution called CentOS Stream, but it's not the same distribution as CentOS, and it doesn't have the same goals of CentOS. It would be correct to say that CentOS is being replaced by CentOS Stream, but that means that CentOS is no more. You may argue that this is pedantic though, and that the phrase "the death of CentOS" is intended to communicate something which isn't accurate. And, yeah, that might be the case.
bayindirh 5y ago
Hey: Please read the answer to this comment first. It contains some very important clarifications. Leaving the comment up for completeness, context and admittance of error. Happy reading. --- Disclaimer: We use CentOS on almost all of our servers at production level for 10+ years. The main problem with CentOS is not moving into a rolling release schedule, but change of its place in the ecosystem. Before, CentOS was the last tier. Fedora was testing ideas, RedHat was implementing them, and CentOS was following the trail by porting them later. There was an unwritten agreement that RedHat didn't prevent CentOS' development, and CentOS didn't port everything at day 1, so they were in a mutualistic state. Moreover, CentOS enjoyed a ~10 year support on every release, so it was the soul-successor of the original RedHat from the olden times. Now, CentOS moved to pre-RH position. So Fedora experiments, CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support. This is problematic for many places since CentOS was the RPM Equivalent of Debian Stable. Now, there's no RedHat based free and community-driven and community-supported distro. People who can't use CentOS in its future state will either migrate to RedHat or to Ubuntu or Debian Stable. For us, and for other data centers which do the same thing as us, current situation is a very big let's wait and see game. For the health of the ecosystem, we need another fully free (as in beer & as in speech) and fully supported distribution. Hope Rocky can fill that void. I'll continue to use Debian on my personal systems, for foreseeable future.
- Ottolay 5y ago
  Why don't people make the effort to just move to Debian Stable? If you don't want to pay any money, relying on Redhat's goodwill always seemed precarious.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    Because there's a big software stack from drivers to scientific software which is being developed for 10+ years (or even longer) for RH based distributions, or for CentOS/ScientificLinux specifically Software development and verification is huge in scientific computing. It's not just "Meh, let's port it in a weekend and be done with it".
simias 5y ago
The move is pretty transparent to me, when CentOS was effectively "free RHEL" many people who didn't feel they needed support just ran CentOS in lieu of RHEL knowing that they'd get near-100% compatibility without paying a dime. The fact that it's a rolling release is not really the problem per-se, it's more that you can no longer expect that CentOS n == RHEL n. It's not a drop-in replacement. You can't expect that something that works in RHEL will work in CentOS and vice-versa. For people who ran CentOS because they liked it over the competition it may not be a deal breaker. For people like me who only used it because it was "free RHEL" the new rolling version is effectively useless. And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license.
- 1337shadow 5y ago
  > And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license. Do you mean that it's not 100% Open Source anymore? That you can't build your RHEL anymore?
- dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
  > And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license. One thing I don't understand is why they vehemently deny it was the reason.
galgalesh 5y ago
Centos was mainly used as a "free but otherwise identical" alternative to RHEL. Centos typically attracted an incredibly conservative and stability-focussed crowd. People who wanted all the benefits of a stable enterprise distro but who didn't want to pay and who didn't need support. Whatever your personal preferences are, it's obvious that this change doesn't fit well with that crowd. Red Hat has every right do do that change, but we shouldn't pretend that this is a good fit for the traditional centos crowd.

IceWreck 5y ago

CentOS is doing nothing like Arch. CentOS rolling release will still be so slow that itll lag a lot behind Fedora. Its just that CentOS will now be afew months ahead of RHEL instead of afew months behind RHEL.

jcelerier 5y ago
eh, honestly centos is one of the few distros where you can get fairly recent compilers even on old versions, much more easily than ubuntus / debians. e.g. even on centos 7 (released in 2009)

kingosticks 5y ago

For many, the reason to use CentOS was that it was stable and supported for 10 years. They killed that and personally I agree with the GP that they have probably killed CentOS along with it. CentOS Stream is "positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL". I'm not sure who this will appeal to but it's not the same group as before.

roody15 5y ago
Exactly midstream between Fedora and RHEL. Who is this target audience exactly ... agree completely was not the same audience that used CentOS.
- dralley 5y ago
  CentOS Stream is getting the exact same types of updates that it got before, just incrementally rather than bundled up into minor releases every 6 months. The chart looks more like this: Fedora ---------------------------------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL It's definitely not "exactly midstream".
jamespo 5y ago
Stable, supported and didn't cost anything

mort96 5y ago

It's semantically correct. CentOS is the name of a Linux distribution, and that Linux distribution is dead. CentOS 8 is the last ever version of CentOS, and it's supported for for 8 more months. There's a new Linux distribution called CentOS Stream, but it's not the same distribution as CentOS, and it doesn't have the same goals of CentOS. It would be correct to say that CentOS is being replaced by CentOS Stream, but that means that CentOS is no more. You may argue that this is pedantic though, and that the phrase "the death of CentOS" is intended to communicate something which isn't accurate. And, yeah, that might be the case.

bayindirh 5y ago

Hey: Please read the answer to this comment first. It contains some very important clarifications. Leaving the comment up for completeness, context and admittance of error. Happy reading. --- Disclaimer: We use CentOS on almost all of our servers at production level for 10+ years. The main problem with CentOS is not moving into a rolling release schedule, but change of its place in the ecosystem. Before, CentOS was the last tier. Fedora was testing ideas, RedHat was implementing them, and CentOS was following the trail by porting them later. There was an unwritten agreement that RedHat didn't prevent CentOS' development, and CentOS didn't port everything at day 1, so they were in a mutualistic state. Moreover, CentOS enjoyed a ~10 year support on every release, so it was the soul-successor of the original RedHat from the olden times. Now, CentOS moved to pre-RH position. So Fedora experiments, CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support. This is problematic for many places since CentOS was the RPM Equivalent of Debian Stable. Now, there's no RedHat based free and community-driven and community-supported distro. People who can't use CentOS in its future state will either migrate to RedHat or to Ubuntu or Debian Stable. For us, and for other data centers which do the same thing as us, current situation is a very big let's wait and see game. For the health of the ecosystem, we need another fully free (as in beer & as in speech) and fully supported distribution. Hope Rocky can fill that void. I'll continue to use Debian on my personal systems, for foreseeable future.

Ottolay 5y ago
Why don't people make the effort to just move to Debian Stable? If you don't want to pay any money, relying on Redhat's goodwill always seemed precarious.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  Because there's a big software stack from drivers to scientific software which is being developed for 10+ years (or even longer) for RH based distributions, or for CentOS/ScientificLinux specifically Software development and verification is huge in scientific computing. It's not just "Meh, let's port it in a weekend and be done with it".

simias 5y ago

The move is pretty transparent to me, when CentOS was effectively "free RHEL" many people who didn't feel they needed support just ran CentOS in lieu of RHEL knowing that they'd get near-100% compatibility without paying a dime. The fact that it's a rolling release is not really the problem per-se, it's more that you can no longer expect that CentOS n == RHEL n. It's not a drop-in replacement. You can't expect that something that works in RHEL will work in CentOS and vice-versa. For people who ran CentOS because they liked it over the competition it may not be a deal breaker. For people like me who only used it because it was "free RHEL" the new rolling version is effectively useless. And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license.

1337shadow 5y ago
> And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license. Do you mean that it's not 100% Open Source anymore? That you can't build your RHEL anymore?
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
> And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license. One thing I don't understand is why they vehemently deny it was the reason.

galgalesh 5y ago

Centos was mainly used as a "free but otherwise identical" alternative to RHEL. Centos typically attracted an incredibly conservative and stability-focussed crowd. People who wanted all the benefits of a stable enterprise distro but who didn't want to pay and who didn't need support. Whatever your personal preferences are, it's obvious that this change doesn't fit well with that crowd. Red Hat has every right do do that change, but we shouldn't pretend that this is a good fit for the traditional centos crowd.