3 ms·

Converting to Rocky, Alma, or Oracle Linux will extend support to 2029 with minimal changes to the installed system. Most CentOS 8 users would likely have done

by chasil 5y ago

Converting to Rocky, Alma, or Oracle Linux will extend support to 2029 with minimal changes to the installed system. Most CentOS 8 users would likely have done this by now. Red Hat also offered a conversion procedure the last time I looked, but it replaced every installed RPM with equivalents from its own repositories. This is quite violent, and it would be far from my first choice for a critical system.

rubyist5eva 5y ago
I can vouch for Alma linux personally, we switched and it was painless.
bityard 5y ago
> but it replaced every installed RPM with equivalents from its own repositories. This is quite violent The whole point of CentOS was to be 100% compatible with RHEL, right down to the packages and binaries. For literally this kind of scenario. I don't see how that's "violent." I'm also not sure how you can expect to convert from one distro to the other without replacing all (or at least most) of the packages.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > I'm also not sure how you can expect to convert from one distro to the other without replacing all (or at least most) of the packages. The thing is, they were almost exactly the same distro, so in any meaningful sense you could switch from one to the other by switching the release files, some yum support stuff, I think the kernel?, and some miscellaneous branding if you cared. But 99% of packages were functionally the same, so yeah I don't see replacement being a problem per se, but it also didn't seem very necessary.
- dralley 5y ago
  Ehhhhh. The code is the same, yes. The "binaries" are not, necessarily. The build environment isn't exactly the same and there have been bugs experienced in CentOS that weren't in RHEL and vice versa. So it was never 100% compatible, more like 99.5%. The exceptions are rare edge cases but they do exist.

3 ms·

Converting to Rocky, Alma, or Oracle Linux will extend support to 2029 with minimal changes to the installed system. Most CentOS 8 users would likely have done

by chasil 5y ago

rubyist5eva 5y ago
I can vouch for Alma linux personally, we switched and it was painless.
bityard 5y ago
> but it replaced every installed RPM with equivalents from its own repositories. This is quite violent The whole point of CentOS was to be 100% compatible with RHEL, right down to the packages and binaries. For literally this kind of scenario. I don't see how that's "violent." I'm also not sure how you can expect to convert from one distro to the other without replacing all (or at least most) of the packages.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > I'm also not sure how you can expect to convert from one distro to the other without replacing all (or at least most) of the packages. The thing is, they were almost exactly the same distro, so in any meaningful sense you could switch from one to the other by switching the release files, some yum support stuff, I think the kernel?, and some miscellaneous branding if you cared. But 99% of packages were functionally the same, so yeah I don't see replacement being a problem per se, but it also didn't seem very necessary.
- dralley 5y ago
  Ehhhhh. The code is the same, yes. The "binaries" are not, necessarily. The build environment isn't exactly the same and there have been bugs experienced in CentOS that weren't in RHEL and vice versa. So it was never 100% compatible, more like 99.5%. The exceptions are rare edge cases but they do exist.