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But that's the thing, there is no good thing going. CentOS used to be a community rebuild of RHEL, and you could then use that if you didn't want support from R

But that's the thing, there is no good thing going. CentOS used to be a community rebuild of RHEL, and you could then use that if you didn't want support from Red Hat. But that is no longer the case since Red Hat killed that. CentOS is now more like a beta version of RHEL and not a binary compatible build. At the same time, patches are made for RHEL that are kept secret and not published for CentOS. And all of this is extra bad since those masses of CentOS installs exist because people don't really want to deal with Red Hat, but some other vendor just happened to not test their application on another distro, and corporate policies then don't allow you to run it on a non-binary-compatible system. If there would be different packages, i.e. just an OCI image or a single statically linked program, or perhaps a vended virtual machine image, none of this OS vendor BS would exist. You would be able to run wherever you want to run, on whatever you want to run it. And some people and companies would still choose Red Hat, but anyone who has used anything else would probably not.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> there is no good thing going. Strong disagree. I benefit greatly from Fedora and CentOS Stream.
- oneplane 3y ago
  Strong disagree. Fedora and CentOS Stream (well, C8 Stream is dead, but the other stream-position I suppose) add no value to me whatsoever and working with it is a net negative. The only reason we're still touching it is because vendors like Manhattan (logistics and warehousing) can't seem to get their head out of their ass.
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Rocky Linux carries on the spirit of the original CentOS, by a former founder no less
INTPenis 3y ago
That's not true. CentOS Stream is literally the testing ground for RHEL patches. So CentOS gets patches much earlier now than it ever did as a community project. I relied heavily on CentOS but at least I'm being honest, I relied on CentOS because it was a free version of RHEL. People got so mad when RHEL took away their free OS that they make up all sorts of excuses. Fact is Red Hat have been contributing back to open source for 25+ years. As far as companies goes, it's one of the best we have in the open source ecosystem. So this is why we can't have nice things. When someone actually get successful in open source we try to destroy them.
- oneplane 3y ago
  > That's not true. CentOS Stream is literally the testing ground for RHEL patches. So CentOS gets patches much earlier now than it ever did as a community project. It definitely is true, in our RHEL subscriptions we get patches that do not exist in CentOS. We also see those differences in fully patched systems where the patch versions run different binary code. > I relied heavily on CentOS [..] > Fact is [..] > So this is why [..] All those other arguments are not very relevant, they bought CentOS and then broke community trust multiple times to the point where we now have multiple re-incarnations of the CentOS concept and RHEL (or IBM) thought they could prevent that by hiding the sources used for current RHEL builds from the public by default. Money-wise it's also not relevant because there are only two reasons you pay for support: 1. You actually need support (we never did in the past 15 years) 2. Corporate nonsense (this applies to some of our vendors) Red Hat is fully leaning into #2 and it's just not having any real value if you don't also fit in #1.
  - mmcgrath1 3y ago
    >It definitely is true, in our RHEL subscriptions we get patches that do not exist in CentOS. Citation needed. Source: I work at Red Hat and made the policy that stuff needs to go to CentOS Stream first. The only exceptions should be embargoed or critical/important CVEs, those go to customers before CentOS Stream. If you find any code, features, or bug sizes in RHEL that aren't in stream, it's a bug, let us know and we will fix it.
    - oneplane 3y ago
      Well, you already mentioned it: the important updates that already have PoC in the wild that are somehow patched for RHEL but not for CentOS. The lag isn't always huge, but we definitely can't consider CentOS a RHEL bug-for-bug compatible rebuild anymore. Maybe the issue wasn't highlighted as much in the past where the rebuild compatibility meant that packages could go out without also having the source (in CentOS).

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> there is no good thing going. Strong disagree. I benefit greatly from Fedora and CentOS Stream.

oneplane 3y ago
Strong disagree. Fedora and CentOS Stream (well, C8 Stream is dead, but the other stream-position I suppose) add no value to me whatsoever and working with it is a net negative. The only reason we're still touching it is because vendors like Manhattan (logistics and warehousing) can't seem to get their head out of their ass.

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Rocky Linux carries on the spirit of the original CentOS, by a former founder no less

INTPenis 3y ago

That's not true. CentOS Stream is literally the testing ground for RHEL patches. So CentOS gets patches much earlier now than it ever did as a community project. I relied heavily on CentOS but at least I'm being honest, I relied on CentOS because it was a free version of RHEL. People got so mad when RHEL took away their free OS that they make up all sorts of excuses. Fact is Red Hat have been contributing back to open source for 25+ years. As far as companies goes, it's one of the best we have in the open source ecosystem. So this is why we can't have nice things. When someone actually get successful in open source we try to destroy them.

oneplane 3y ago
> That's not true. CentOS Stream is literally the testing ground for RHEL patches. So CentOS gets patches much earlier now than it ever did as a community project. It definitely is true, in our RHEL subscriptions we get patches that do not exist in CentOS. We also see those differences in fully patched systems where the patch versions run different binary code. > I relied heavily on CentOS [..] > Fact is [..] > So this is why [..] All those other arguments are not very relevant, they bought CentOS and then broke community trust multiple times to the point where we now have multiple re-incarnations of the CentOS concept and RHEL (or IBM) thought they could prevent that by hiding the sources used for current RHEL builds from the public by default. Money-wise it's also not relevant because there are only two reasons you pay for support: 1. You actually need support (we never did in the past 15 years) 2. Corporate nonsense (this applies to some of our vendors) Red Hat is fully leaning into #2 and it's just not having any real value if you don't also fit in #1.
- mmcgrath1 3y ago
  >It definitely is true, in our RHEL subscriptions we get patches that do not exist in CentOS. Citation needed. Source: I work at Red Hat and made the policy that stuff needs to go to CentOS Stream first. The only exceptions should be embargoed or critical/important CVEs, those go to customers before CentOS Stream. If you find any code, features, or bug sizes in RHEL that aren't in stream, it's a bug, let us know and we will fix it.
  - oneplane 3y ago
    Well, you already mentioned it: the important updates that already have PoC in the wild that are somehow patched for RHEL but not for CentOS. The lag isn't always huge, but we definitely can't consider CentOS a RHEL bug-for-bug compatible rebuild anymore. Maybe the issue wasn't highlighted as much in the past where the rebuild compatibility meant that packages could go out without also having the source (in CentOS).