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CentOS was, as you say, a community developed drop-in replacement for RedHat RHEL that subsumed a number of earlier RPM-based distributions in the early-mid 200
by PAPPPmAc 3y ago
CentOS was, as you say, a community developed drop-in replacement for RedHat RHEL that subsumed a number of earlier RPM-based distributions in the early-mid 2000s. It was _widely_ used: in the 2010s the CentOS install base was on the same scale as Debian.
The CentOS governance structure and trademarks were effectively absorbed by RedHat, Inc in 2014.
In 2020 RedHat unilaterally "refocused" CentOS from being essentially "Community RHEL" to being "CentOS Stream" which is more or less a stability channel somewhere between Fedora and RHEL. This doesn't suit the needs of many folks who were running CentOS, and was done so abruptly that they even broke support window promises on the current release at the time, so it generated some bad feelings.
AlmaLinux and RockyLinux are projects that promptly spun up to replace CentOS in the "Community RHEL" role, from different prominent members of the community: Alma from CloudLinux, Inc. and Rocky from Greg Kurtzer of [CentOS cofounder,Warewulf,Singularity/AppTainer, CIQ] fame.
I don't know all the inside politics, but the reason there are two appears to be partly related to concerns about governance structure to prevent another round of commercial capture of community resources.
- indigodaddy 3y agoI don’t have any numbers to back me up— just a hunch and from my own experiences in the industry, I would think that in the 2010’s the install base of Debian would have paled in comparison to CentOS (this would be on the interwebs of course). I don’t know that you could say that they were on the same scale, with my suspicion that CentOS was way more prevalent. I’d be interested in stats on that from 2010s, and now. I’d even suspect that even today, EL as a whole might outnumber Debian, but perhaps not Ubuntu or Debian/Ubuntu combined (even notwithstanding the rise of containers).
- PAPPPmAc 3y agoI was going by this low hanging chart from the server market: https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popular_linux_distribution_on_web_servers https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popula... which seems credible with my memories from industry buddies at the time. Though, as you allude, I bet a lot of CentOS installations aren't as visible, given its prevalence in things like compute clusters, dev systems, and that sort of thing. (I have no horse in the race, my personal day-to-day use machines are mostly Arch boxes, and I regularly work on both Debian and CentOS-transitioning-to-Rocky machines.)
- indigodaddy 3y agoThanks for the link! Seems as though Debian was more popular than I realized on the internet..