15 ms·

June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

220 points by kristianpaul 3y ago

jasoneckert 3y ago
This EOL date is a generous one. Like my organization, most others I know have already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023. Thus, these 6 months are mainly for the few outliers who have not.
- redskyluan 3y ago
  [dead]
- p_l 3y ago
  > already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023 ahahahahaha.... OTOH, I no longer work there, I get to watch the fireworks
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Heh... I still see CentOS 6 with some regularity.
    - p_l 3y ago
      That company had few load-bearing CentOS 6 machines that barely anyone knew how to operate (as in "where are the SSH keys, passwords, where shit is stored on them") and docs were in disarray. The replacement project for remaining CentOS 6 machines was going glacially, but at least didn't endanger compliance. The replacement project for CentOS 7 got sabotaged by management, few people got run out of the company, last I heard the replacement project for the replacement project was going to just end up with few multimillion cheques to OpenLogic so that certain big fat client group doesn't drop them like hot potato on EOL day.
    - 9659 3y ago
      I wouldn't use the word "regularity", but the pleasure of debugging a long standing issue on a RHEL 5 machine came up in December. had to compile git and tcpdump from source. all in all, a pleasant experience. vi is the same.
- JeremyNT 3y ago
  > This EOL date is a generous one. Like my organization, most others I know have already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023. Thus, these 6 months are mainly for the few outliers who have not. I can't disprove your anecdote but do you think this is really true? Orgs who ran CentOS likely did so with the idea that they'd have a very long time to migrate to something different. CentOS 8 nominally had support until something like 2032, so it seems like a really major change to go from almost a decade to a little over a year to migrate away.
dralley 3y ago
Long live CentOS Stream
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
Rocky Linux is a fine successor to CentOS and was created by one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer. https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ If you need enterprise support RHEL tends to be a default choice. If you cannot afford RHEL or do not need enterprise support, Rocky Linux fills the role that CentOS once did.
- 0x6c6f6c 3y ago
  Another suitable option, which has handled the situation of Red Hat source RPM releases[1] quite a bit better imo, is Alma Linux. https://almalinux.org/ https://almalinux.org/ Similar goal, but is working more directly upstream with Red Hat[2] as opposed to the (as I last had read) undisclosed and non-open approach that Rocky Linux has taken. 1: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... 2: https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/ https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chasil 3y ago
    As I understand it, Alma is following the stream release, which is slightly upstream and less stable than RHEL. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-discovers-working-with-red-hat-and-centos-stream-isnt-easy https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-... Rocky and SUSE Liberty Linux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, which has become more difficult.
    - bityard 3y ago
      This is the first time I have heard of SUSE Liberty Linux as an alternative to RHEL... when I went searching for information on it, all I could find was the product page and some press releases. It's hard to read between the lines of the marketing speak but it sounds like it's just a suite of paid support options for existing RHEL/CentOS deployments and not a RHEL derivative that one can just download and use. Unless I am missing something?
paulryanrogers 3y ago
Technically EOL of CentOS 7. Guessing 8 will be supported for a while, then one must decide to switch to CentOS Stream, RHEL proper, or an alternative like Rocky.
- Nyr 3y ago
  CentOS 8 already reached its EOL in December 31st, 2021.
  - bpoyner 3y ago
    If you moved from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream 8, Stream 8 is basically EOL on May 31st 2024.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Okay, but RHEL Beta- er, sorry, "CentOS Stream" isn't CentOS.
highwind 3y ago
Hoping for 10 years of support, I adopted Centos 8 a week before the EOL announcement. I never understood why they decided to support 7 longer than 8.
- bombcar 3y ago
  That was the real rug-pull. Had they supported CentOS 8 for the full 10 years, and announced that starting with 9 it would be this useless rolling release, people would have been much more calm about the whole thing.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Yep. It would've been disappointing, but it wouldn't have knocked the bee hive off the tree, so to speak. The announcement came right after I had switched over all my stuff to target CentOS 8. If they had given me the runway to make it feel like all that work wasn't for nothing, I would've been okay taking a few years to slowly roll to something else.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Same. I mostly support what Red Hat has done (after many hours of listening to arguments and thinking about them. Not the prima facie arguments that they made which were PR BS and spin, but the real reasons that were only gotten to by podcast hosts that pushed back a bit. But the CentOS 8 rug pull was a bad move and IMHO is really hard to defend because it came down to a short-term profit grab to try to force people to buy RHEL. I think long-term profit motive is a good thing (within reason and without compromising the open source principles) as it keeps RHEL sustainable, but the rug pull of CentOS 8 was wrong.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        I can't say I wouldn't have done a similar pull on the rug, but having a plan before-hand for open source users, home users, and even "small business" users would have gone a long way to making the pill easier to swallow. I know for myself, where I could fit into all three of those, I just won't use RedHat anything anymore. Whereas if there had been a "pay one-time fee of $500" or whatever to get "ten years of self-support/no-support" our server would be RedHat today. As it is .... 5.4.0-169-generic #187-Ubuntu SMP
klysm 3y ago
Long live Debian
- behnamoh 3y ago
  Does `apt` handle packages as cleanly as `dnf` and `yum`? Last time I tried `apt`, it would uninstall apps without cleaning after itself.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    “apt purge” takes no prisoners.
    - npteljes 3y ago
      Apt purge cleans up user config files after a package, but not package dependencies. For complete package removal, apt autoremove is needed even after apt purge.
      - kstrauser 3y ago
        True, but its output suggests that you do that and tells you what it would autoremove.
        npteljes 3y ago
        Indeed. So it not only doesn't do a complete job, it "takes prisoners" too. Taking no prisoners would mean it's aggressive, relentless, thorough, and apt is neither of these, it's a solid, professional tool, with some legacy baggage, but at least it's friendly and discoverable about it. In the current thread, I'm only nit-picky about this, because OP said "Last time I tried `apt`, it would uninstall apps without cleaning after itself". To which to suggest that apt-purge does clean up after itself is incorrect. It does some additional cleaning-up, but it doesn't do a complete cleaning-up. That being said, of all the package managers I tried, I still like apt the best. I feel like it's the most straightforward and user-friendly of all of them.
brycewray 3y ago
Apparently there were videos there, but viewing them would require allowing advertising cookies. Hmm.
meisel 3y ago
I don't know much about CentOS, but I've seen a lot of anger about the end of CentOS Linux, regardless of CentOS stream, Rocky, etc. . Can someone explain the history of this, why CentOS is going away, why it's being replaced with these new alternatives, and why many seem quite mad about it? Just curious to understand the state of it.
- davweb 3y ago
  CentOS was created as open source distribution compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was successful as it gave most of the benefits of RHEL without the expense. RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1]. RedHat shut CentOS down. New alternatives are coming along to take the role of a free distribution compatible with RHEL. [1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
  - dralley 3y ago
    >RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1]. >RedHat shut CentOS down. It should be noted that six years passed between point A and point B, during which time Red Hat did invest quite a lot of additional resources in CentOS. Red Hat did not acquire CentOS and then immediately shut it down. CentOS Stream is also not a wholly different thing from CentOS, although it is obviously not exactly the same thing.
- throwaway562if1 3y ago
  Red Hat had given a lifecycle for CentOS 8 with an EOL in 2029. IBM acquired Red Hat, and promptly announced they were reneging on this schedule. Given that the primary draw of CentOS/RHEL are long-term, reliable, well-supported, stable operating systems, users were... displeased. CentOS stream is primarily intended to onboard users onto RHEL, which is undesirable when nobody trusts Red Hat to keep their word now.
  - op00to 3y ago
    > Red Hat had given a lifecycle for CentOS 8 with an EOL in 2029 I thought that neither Red Hat nor CentOS foundation gave a lifecycle date for CentOS 8. Can you help me find that lifecycle statement?
behnamoh 3y ago
Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. To me, open-source is about the open, transparent "culture" in which you commit to develop, not about putting things out there for free (as in free beer). Too many companies already benefiting from open-source packages (e.g., OpenCV) without giving anything back to the community.
- martinky24 3y ago
  "Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    "Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.
    - randombits0 3y ago
      Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
      - RamblingCTO 3y ago
        Leave out the "cr" and I agree
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
      - monkeywork 3y ago
        because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs. I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle
iseletsk 3y ago
You can get a few more years of CentOS7 supported from TuxCare https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-exte...
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  > Our research has identified numerous critical and high-risk vulnerabilities that your vendor hasn’t patched. This sort of language strikes me as fear-mongering. I can't tell which issues they have patched in CentOS7 that otherwise remain unpatched. Anyone know what they are talking about?
  - saaskube 3y ago
    https://cve.tuxcare.com/els/cve?cve=&os=5779c3e2-4d4e-4612-8386-25e5fc241ed6&project=&version=&status=4761a92a-acb2-412a-aa23-0e86510efa78&after=&before=&orderBy=updated-desc&_gl=1*15if10s*_up*MQ..*_ga*Njg2NTk3ODQuMTcwMDE1MTQxNg..*_ga_1790YFKF4F*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA..*_ga_Z539WTSZ80*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA..*_ga_64QBSWJJGS*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA https://cve.tuxcare.com/els/cve?cve=&os=5779c3e2-4d4e-4612-8.....
chasil 3y ago
Does it also mark the end of IBM's RedHat as the OpenELA assumes the authoritative role? That's likely the best possible outcome. https://openela.org/ https://openela.org/
BSDobelix 3y ago
This is really the time to make a decision, do you really need support..ehm sorry insurance? Then RedHat/Suse/Oracle if not, choose a trusted community distribution like Debian.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  We moved everything to debian when Centos moved to a stretch release for 8, no regrets whatsoever, zero difference in stability, solved some niche hardware support issues. Writing was on the wall back then tbh. Redhat can enjoy it's legacy bubble, I'll continue to enjoy not paying for free software.
  - BSDobelix 3y ago
    >I'll continue to enjoy not paying for free software. Well we pay for it (the project and different other software projects..and even a completely different os) but in donations instead to pay stakeholders and "managers". ;)
- dylan604 3y ago
  I am curious about what the expense of support gets you that a typical IT person could not find on some forum somewhere online.
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    Getting someone to actually fixing bugs in the distro, without begging on some forum or whatever.
  - BSDobelix 3y ago
    That's why i wrote insurance, not insurance for the installation but your job position AKA someone else has to fix the problem ;) Same as: No one gets fired for buying IBM (if your really old...like me)
    - dylan604 3y ago
throw929612 3y ago
Big thanks to the CentOS project, which probably did as much to improve the size and health of the EL ecosystem as any other single factor, and did much of that work long before any official association with Red Hat. Much respect for the tenacity required to figure out how to bootstrap RHEL without its build system. (Shout out to White Box Enterprise Linux as well!)
- bityard 3y ago
  Scientific Linux was one of my favorites for a while. I stumbled onto it back when some important CentOS leader went missing and the future of the whole project looked uncertain. SL7 is still supported until June 2024. The maintainers decided not to do SL8 and are now contributing to AlmaLinux instead.
bluedino 3y ago
For better or for worse, this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support. Many have started to offer Ubuntu support in it's place. Most of them didn't even try to support stream. I'm not sure what the process behind that was. CentOS was free, which is why we used it. Sure, our SAP boxes run RHEL but the other stuff doesn't. We started moving a lot of stuff to Ubuntu as well. Now, Ubuntu is by no means perfect, snaps are annoying, etc. But Red Hat really angers me with their decisions during the last few years. One example is removing OpenLDAP: The openldap-servers package was removed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The openldap-clients package is still shipped though. If you use openldap-servers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7), you need to consider to change your LDAP server from OpenLDAP to Red Hat Directory Server (RHDS) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8). RHDS is provided as an add-on subscription in RHEL8, so you need buy the subscriptions in addition to RHEL subscription. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3816971 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3816971 Additionally, Red Hat support is so bad these days. It almost reminds me of Microsoft Technet forums of the past. Random 'techs' offering copy-paste solutions and the same bad information.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >But Red Hat really angers me with their decisions during the last few years. Probably because Red Hat is no longer making those decisions
- op00to 3y ago
  > this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support Can you list a few? It's good to keep up to date on how this is changing. Thanks!
  - bluedino 3y ago
    Ansys for one https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-support/ansys-platform-support-strategy-and-plans-january-2023.pdf https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-supp... Veeam doesn't support CentOS stream or 9, there's been a bunch of things here and there. I notice many are moving to Ubuntu. I had to go through all of our vendors last year, and the nice thing about CentOS was almost everyone supported it. Now there's no 'gold standard'.
dwitcher 3y ago
It's interesting to see the different strategies people are adopting. I recently came across TuxCare's Extended Support for CentOS 7, an interesting stopgap for those not ready for an immediate RHEL shift. https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-exte... Somewhat surprisingly, it's also pretty affordable. It's one of the few options like this I've seen, though I'm curious if there are others that are around this same price.
dannyz 3y ago
A lot of package managers that distribute binaries (e.g. conda-forge) rely on CentOS 7 because of the relatively old glibc version available, I wonder what all of these projects are planning on moving on to
spapas82 3y ago
This is a very important milestone for us since we have a lot of Centos 7 servers and can't go to RHEL. From my point of view, there are more or less three solutions: a. Go to Debian (or ubuntu server etc); probably the most difficult since everything will be different b. Go to a fresh Almalinux or Rocky 9 installation; also very difficult since there's a lot of stuff to be moved c. Try to use in-place upgrade using Leapp or something. There are some guides for this (https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-AlmaLinux-9.html#migrate-centos-7-to-almalinux-8 https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-Alma...) but I'm really not sure how good this would work on a live production system. I'd definitely prefer the solution c, if I can confirm that it works of course. Has anybody tried using leapp to upgrade Centos 7 to Rocky/Alma ? What was your experience? Do you feel that it's worth researching that path or it's probably better to move to a greenfield installation? Thank you for any insights!
- dclaw 3y ago
  For what it's worth, we're trying to do a lot of our server upgrades with the Elevate scripting to Almalinux, but man can it be a pain. We have a 30% success rate in testing, and even when it goes right it tends to be 2-3 hours of downtime. The alternative though is to rebuild every server on spare hardware and manually migrate data and configurations over. So it's still a better option once we can figure it out. I'm hoping to get downtime <1hr and >90% success rate before we start really pushing through these by April.
  - bennyvasquez 3y ago
    That's a bummer! I know there's a few places that have used it on the 50k+ scale, so once the kinks for your environment, it should be great. If there's anything that can be done to improve the script, we'd love to help! Feel free to join the chat and share what's up in ~migrations.
- scruple 3y ago
  We briefly looked at it. We decided to just move everything to Ubuntu. It's been a lot of work, and taken a lot of time, but ultimately we feel that it's been worth it. Ubuntu isn't without it's own problems but we're much happier today and feel that we're more future-proof for it.
semessier 3y ago
I believe the CentOS EoL will impact the re-builders albeit this complex. Not everything is GPL, they need the sources that may be a huge issue. To a lesser extent, probably the build script in the source rpem helps.
thrusong 3y ago
I only have a half dozen web servers, but I used CentOS for everything so I'm sad it's the end of the line. That being said, I've recently completed moving entirely over to Debian and there's just something about it I love so much more...
unethical_ban 3y ago
CentOS stream still exists? So the title should say CentOS 7?
- tuna74 3y ago
  This is the last CentOS, so the title is technically correct. CentOS Stream goes on however.
sdsdfewwe 3y ago
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tb_technical 3y ago
Of course they want to EOL CentOS. It was a serious competitor to RHEL
deleted 3y ago
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INTPenis 3y ago
I'm taking this opportunity to migrate a few k8s clusters from CentOS 7 to CoreOS instead. Which is a big move because it means that instead of using Ansible to setup the k8s services we put everything into Terraform and Ignition. Or cloud-init if you want to use Talos or Flatcar. Other than those big clusters we have some CentOS systems spread out for minor services and those we're migrating to either RHEL or Fedora, depending on circumstances and requirements.
__s 3y ago
I spent a long time preparing for this because for a managed postgres service there's a hiccup: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes > in glibc version 2.28, released 2018-08-01, a major update to the locale data has been included, which can potentially affect the data of many users Migrating to rhel8 was being considered, but since locale changes are inevitable, it made an opportunity to have us pivot to ubuntu
refracture 3y ago
Was reneging on CentOS 8's support cycle what led to that Red Hat developer for individuals license that allows 16 hosts? I haven't gotten a good sense of if they introduced that to placate some people or if they had planned on it.
usernamed7 3y ago
i really liked CentOS - it was definitely my goto distro for spinning up a server. Yum is so much saner than what ubuntu is up to. Thankfully now, not something i have to do with as much - i run a website with DB and don't even know what the distro is - a detail i'm glad to leave to abstractions and platforms to manage.
deleted 3y ago
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throwaway0x4 3y ago
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klipklop 3y ago
Too late Red Hat, we already have dumped our CentOS fleet (thousands of hosts) for another distro. Will never trust IBM/RedHat. I was real annoyed as I did a tun of work prepping for a migration to CentOS 8 and then got rug-pulled by IBM with CentOS Stream. They lost all the goodwill just to make a tiny bit more money. Now I am doing everything possible to eliminate RHEL servers. What next will they pull? The longer you depend on them, they more they can charge you later.
eaxrdi 3y ago
that's sad.

220 points by kristianpaul 3y ago

This EOL date is a generous one. Like my organization, most others I know have already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023. Thus, these 6 months are mainly for the few outliers who have not.

redskyluan 3y ago
[dead]
p_l 3y ago
> already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023 ahahahahaha.... OTOH, I no longer work there, I get to watch the fireworks
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Heh... I still see CentOS 6 with some regularity.
  - p_l 3y ago
    That company had few load-bearing CentOS 6 machines that barely anyone knew how to operate (as in "where are the SSH keys, passwords, where shit is stored on them") and docs were in disarray. The replacement project for remaining CentOS 6 machines was going glacially, but at least didn't endanger compliance. The replacement project for CentOS 7 got sabotaged by management, few people got run out of the company, last I heard the replacement project for the replacement project was going to just end up with few multimillion cheques to OpenLogic so that certain big fat client group doesn't drop them like hot potato on EOL day.
  - 9659 3y ago
    I wouldn't use the word "regularity", but the pleasure of debugging a long standing issue on a RHEL 5 machine came up in December. had to compile git and tcpdump from source. all in all, a pleasant experience. vi is the same.
JeremyNT 3y ago
> This EOL date is a generous one. Like my organization, most others I know have already completed their migration from CentOS to RHEL/Fedora/Rocky/Alma/etc during the early part of 2023. Thus, these 6 months are mainly for the few outliers who have not. I can't disprove your anecdote but do you think this is really true? Orgs who ran CentOS likely did so with the idea that they'd have a very long time to migrate to something different. CentOS 8 nominally had support until something like 2032, so it seems like a really major change to go from almost a decade to a little over a year to migrate away.

dralley 3y ago

Long live CentOS Stream

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

Rocky Linux is a fine successor to CentOS and was created by one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer. https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ If you need enterprise support RHEL tends to be a default choice. If you cannot afford RHEL or do not need enterprise support, Rocky Linux fills the role that CentOS once did.

0x6c6f6c 3y ago
Another suitable option, which has handled the situation of Red Hat source RPM releases[1] quite a bit better imo, is Alma Linux. https://almalinux.org/ https://almalinux.org/ Similar goal, but is working more directly upstream with Red Hat[2] as opposed to the (as I last had read) undisclosed and non-open approach that Rocky Linux has taken. 1: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... 2: https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/ https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- chasil 3y ago
  As I understand it, Alma is following the stream release, which is slightly upstream and less stable than RHEL. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-discovers-working-with-red-hat-and-centos-stream-isnt-easy https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-... Rocky and SUSE Liberty Linux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, which has become more difficult.
  - bityard 3y ago
    This is the first time I have heard of SUSE Liberty Linux as an alternative to RHEL... when I went searching for information on it, all I could find was the product page and some press releases. It's hard to read between the lines of the marketing speak but it sounds like it's just a suite of paid support options for existing RHEL/CentOS deployments and not a RHEL derivative that one can just download and use. Unless I am missing something?

paulryanrogers 3y ago

Technically EOL of CentOS 7. Guessing 8 will be supported for a while, then one must decide to switch to CentOS Stream, RHEL proper, or an alternative like Rocky.

Nyr 3y ago
CentOS 8 already reached its EOL in December 31st, 2021.
- bpoyner 3y ago
  If you moved from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream 8, Stream 8 is basically EOL on May 31st 2024.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Okay, but RHEL Beta- er, sorry, "CentOS Stream" isn't CentOS.

highwind 3y ago

Hoping for 10 years of support, I adopted Centos 8 a week before the EOL announcement. I never understood why they decided to support 7 longer than 8.

bombcar 3y ago
That was the real rug-pull. Had they supported CentOS 8 for the full 10 years, and announced that starting with 9 it would be this useless rolling release, people would have been much more calm about the whole thing.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Yep. It would've been disappointing, but it wouldn't have knocked the bee hive off the tree, so to speak. The announcement came right after I had switched over all my stuff to target CentOS 8. If they had given me the runway to make it feel like all that work wasn't for nothing, I would've been okay taking a few years to slowly roll to something else.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Same. I mostly support what Red Hat has done (after many hours of listening to arguments and thinking about them. Not the prima facie arguments that they made which were PR BS and spin, but the real reasons that were only gotten to by podcast hosts that pushed back a bit. But the CentOS 8 rug pull was a bad move and IMHO is really hard to defend because it came down to a short-term profit grab to try to force people to buy RHEL. I think long-term profit motive is a good thing (within reason and without compromising the open source principles) as it keeps RHEL sustainable, but the rug pull of CentOS 8 was wrong.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I can't say I wouldn't have done a similar pull on the rug, but having a plan before-hand for open source users, home users, and even "small business" users would have gone a long way to making the pill easier to swallow. I know for myself, where I could fit into all three of those, I just won't use RedHat anything anymore. Whereas if there had been a "pay one-time fee of $500" or whatever to get "ten years of self-support/no-support" our server would be RedHat today. As it is .... 5.4.0-169-generic #187-Ubuntu SMP

klysm 3y ago

Long live Debian

behnamoh 3y ago
Does `apt` handle packages as cleanly as `dnf` and `yum`? Last time I tried `apt`, it would uninstall apps without cleaning after itself.
- kstrauser 3y ago
  “apt purge” takes no prisoners.
  - npteljes 3y ago
    Apt purge cleans up user config files after a package, but not package dependencies. For complete package removal, apt autoremove is needed even after apt purge.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      True, but its output suggests that you do that and tells you what it would autoremove.
      - npteljes 3y ago
        Indeed. So it not only doesn't do a complete job, it "takes prisoners" too. Taking no prisoners would mean it's aggressive, relentless, thorough, and apt is neither of these, it's a solid, professional tool, with some legacy baggage, but at least it's friendly and discoverable about it. In the current thread, I'm only nit-picky about this, because OP said "Last time I tried `apt`, it would uninstall apps without cleaning after itself". To which to suggest that apt-purge does clean up after itself is incorrect. It does some additional cleaning-up, but it doesn't do a complete cleaning-up. That being said, of all the package managers I tried, I still like apt the best. I feel like it's the most straightforward and user-friendly of all of them.

brycewray 3y ago

Apparently there were videos there, but viewing them would require allowing advertising cookies. Hmm.

meisel 3y ago

I don't know much about CentOS, but I've seen a lot of anger about the end of CentOS Linux, regardless of CentOS stream, Rocky, etc. . Can someone explain the history of this, why CentOS is going away, why it's being replaced with these new alternatives, and why many seem quite mad about it? Just curious to understand the state of it.

davweb 3y ago
CentOS was created as open source distribution compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It was successful as it gave most of the benefits of RHEL without the expense. RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1]. RedHat shut CentOS down. New alternatives are coming along to take the role of a free distribution compatible with RHEL. [1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-centos-join-forces https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
- dralley 3y ago
  >RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1]. >RedHat shut CentOS down. It should be noted that six years passed between point A and point B, during which time Red Hat did invest quite a lot of additional resources in CentOS. Red Hat did not acquire CentOS and then immediately shut it down. CentOS Stream is also not a wholly different thing from CentOS, although it is obviously not exactly the same thing.
throwaway562if1 3y ago
Red Hat had given a lifecycle for CentOS 8 with an EOL in 2029. IBM acquired Red Hat, and promptly announced they were reneging on this schedule. Given that the primary draw of CentOS/RHEL are long-term, reliable, well-supported, stable operating systems, users were... displeased. CentOS stream is primarily intended to onboard users onto RHEL, which is undesirable when nobody trusts Red Hat to keep their word now.
- op00to 3y ago
  > Red Hat had given a lifecycle for CentOS 8 with an EOL in 2029 I thought that neither Red Hat nor CentOS foundation gave a lifecycle date for CentOS 8. Can you help me find that lifecycle statement?

behnamoh 3y ago

Well, Redhat has to make money somehow, so this decision is understandable. To me, open-source is about the open, transparent "culture" in which you commit to develop, not about putting things out there for free (as in free beer). Too many companies already benefiting from open-source packages (e.g., OpenCV) without giving anything back to the community.

martinky24 3y ago
"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  "Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.
  - randombits0 3y ago
    Perhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
    - RamblingCTO 3y ago
      Leave out the "cr" and I agree
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    RH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
    - monkeywork 3y ago
      because having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs. I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle

iseletsk 3y ago

You can get a few more years of CentOS7 supported from TuxCare https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-exte...

8organicbits 3y ago
> Our research has identified numerous critical and high-risk vulnerabilities that your vendor hasn’t patched. This sort of language strikes me as fear-mongering. I can't tell which issues they have patched in CentOS7 that otherwise remain unpatched. Anyone know what they are talking about?
- saaskube 3y ago
  https://cve.tuxcare.com/els/cve?cve=&os=5779c3e2-4d4e-4612-8386-25e5fc241ed6&project=&version=&status=4761a92a-acb2-412a-aa23-0e86510efa78&after=&before=&orderBy=updated-desc&_gl=1*15if10s*_up*MQ..*_ga*Njg2NTk3ODQuMTcwMDE1MTQxNg..*_ga_1790YFKF4F*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA..*_ga_Z539WTSZ80*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA..*_ga_64QBSWJJGS*MTcwMDE1ODY4Ni4yLjEuMTcwMDE1OTE1My4wLjAuMA https://cve.tuxcare.com/els/cve?cve=&os=5779c3e2-4d4e-4612-8.....

chasil 3y ago

Does it also mark the end of IBM's RedHat as the OpenELA assumes the authoritative role? That's likely the best possible outcome. https://openela.org/ https://openela.org/

BSDobelix 3y ago

This is really the time to make a decision, do you really need support..ehm sorry insurance? Then RedHat/Suse/Oracle if not, choose a trusted community distribution like Debian.

jtriangle 3y ago
We moved everything to debian when Centos moved to a stretch release for 8, no regrets whatsoever, zero difference in stability, solved some niche hardware support issues. Writing was on the wall back then tbh. Redhat can enjoy it's legacy bubble, I'll continue to enjoy not paying for free software.
- BSDobelix 3y ago
  >I'll continue to enjoy not paying for free software. Well we pay for it (the project and different other software projects..and even a completely different os) but in donations instead to pay stakeholders and "managers". ;)
dylan604 3y ago
I am curious about what the expense of support gets you that a typical IT person could not find on some forum somewhere online.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  Getting someone to actually fixing bugs in the distro, without begging on some forum or whatever.
- BSDobelix 3y ago
  That's why i wrote insurance, not insurance for the installation but your job position AKA someone else has to fix the problem ;) Same as: No one gets fired for buying IBM (if your really old...like me)
  - dylan604 3y ago

throw929612 3y ago

Big thanks to the CentOS project, which probably did as much to improve the size and health of the EL ecosystem as any other single factor, and did much of that work long before any official association with Red Hat. Much respect for the tenacity required to figure out how to bootstrap RHEL without its build system. (Shout out to White Box Enterprise Linux as well!)

bityard 3y ago
Scientific Linux was one of my favorites for a while. I stumbled onto it back when some important CentOS leader went missing and the future of the whole project looked uncertain. SL7 is still supported until June 2024. The maintainers decided not to do SL8 and are now contributing to AlmaLinux instead.

bluedino 3y ago

For better or for worse, this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support. Many have started to offer Ubuntu support in it's place. Most of them didn't even try to support stream. I'm not sure what the process behind that was. CentOS was free, which is why we used it. Sure, our SAP boxes run RHEL but the other stuff doesn't. We started moving a lot of stuff to Ubuntu as well. Now, Ubuntu is by no means perfect, snaps are annoying, etc. But Red Hat really angers me with their decisions during the last few years. One example is removing OpenLDAP: The openldap-servers package was removed in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The openldap-clients package is still shipped though. If you use openldap-servers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7), you need to consider to change your LDAP server from OpenLDAP to Red Hat Directory Server (RHDS) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8). RHDS is provided as an add-on subscription in RHEL8, so you need buy the subscriptions in addition to RHEL subscription. https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3816971 https://access.redhat.com/solutions/3816971 Additionally, Red Hat support is so bad these days. It almost reminds me of Microsoft Technet forums of the past. Random 'techs' offering copy-paste solutions and the same bad information.

ramesh31 3y ago
>But Red Hat really angers me with their decisions during the last few years. Probably because Red Hat is no longer making those decisions
op00to 3y ago
> this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support Can you list a few? It's good to keep up to date on how this is changing. Thanks!
- bluedino 3y ago
  Ansys for one https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-support/ansys-platform-support-strategy-and-plans-january-2023.pdf https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-supp... Veeam doesn't support CentOS stream or 9, there's been a bunch of things here and there. I notice many are moving to Ubuntu. I had to go through all of our vendors last year, and the nice thing about CentOS was almost everyone supported it. Now there's no 'gold standard'.

dwitcher 3y ago

It's interesting to see the different strategies people are adopting. I recently came across TuxCare's Extended Support for CentOS 7, an interesting stopgap for those not ready for an immediate RHEL shift. https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/ https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-exte... Somewhat surprisingly, it's also pretty affordable. It's one of the few options like this I've seen, though I'm curious if there are others that are around this same price.

dannyz 3y ago

A lot of package managers that distribute binaries (e.g. conda-forge) rely on CentOS 7 because of the relatively old glibc version available, I wonder what all of these projects are planning on moving on to

spapas82 3y ago

This is a very important milestone for us since we have a lot of Centos 7 servers and can't go to RHEL. From my point of view, there are more or less three solutions: a. Go to Debian (or ubuntu server etc); probably the most difficult since everything will be different b. Go to a fresh Almalinux or Rocky 9 installation; also very difficult since there's a lot of stuff to be moved c. Try to use in-place upgrade using Leapp or something. There are some guides for this (https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-AlmaLinux-9.html#migrate-centos-7-to-almalinux-8 https://wiki.almalinux.org/elevate/ELevating-CentOS7-to-Alma...) but I'm really not sure how good this would work on a live production system. I'd definitely prefer the solution c, if I can confirm that it works of course. Has anybody tried using leapp to upgrade Centos 7 to Rocky/Alma ? What was your experience? Do you feel that it's worth researching that path or it's probably better to move to a greenfield installation? Thank you for any insights!

dclaw 3y ago
For what it's worth, we're trying to do a lot of our server upgrades with the Elevate scripting to Almalinux, but man can it be a pain. We have a 30% success rate in testing, and even when it goes right it tends to be 2-3 hours of downtime. The alternative though is to rebuild every server on spare hardware and manually migrate data and configurations over. So it's still a better option once we can figure it out. I'm hoping to get downtime <1hr and >90% success rate before we start really pushing through these by April.
- bennyvasquez 3y ago
  That's a bummer! I know there's a few places that have used it on the 50k+ scale, so once the kinks for your environment, it should be great. If there's anything that can be done to improve the script, we'd love to help! Feel free to join the chat and share what's up in ~migrations.
scruple 3y ago
We briefly looked at it. We decided to just move everything to Ubuntu. It's been a lot of work, and taken a lot of time, but ultimately we feel that it's been worth it. Ubuntu isn't without it's own problems but we're much happier today and feel that we're more future-proof for it.

semessier 3y ago

I believe the CentOS EoL will impact the re-builders albeit this complex. Not everything is GPL, they need the sources that may be a huge issue. To a lesser extent, probably the build script in the source rpem helps.

thrusong 3y ago

I only have a half dozen web servers, but I used CentOS for everything so I'm sad it's the end of the line. That being said, I've recently completed moving entirely over to Debian and there's just something about it I love so much more...

unethical_ban 3y ago

CentOS stream still exists? So the title should say CentOS 7?

tuna74 3y ago
This is the last CentOS, so the title is technically correct. CentOS Stream goes on however.

sdsdfewwe 3y ago

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tb_technical 3y ago

Of course they want to EOL CentOS. It was a serious competitor to RHEL

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INTPenis 3y ago

I'm taking this opportunity to migrate a few k8s clusters from CentOS 7 to CoreOS instead. Which is a big move because it means that instead of using Ansible to setup the k8s services we put everything into Terraform and Ignition. Or cloud-init if you want to use Talos or Flatcar. Other than those big clusters we have some CentOS systems spread out for minor services and those we're migrating to either RHEL or Fedora, depending on circumstances and requirements.

__s 3y ago

I spent a long time preparing for this because for a managed postgres service there's a hiccup: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes > in glibc version 2.28, released 2018-08-01, a major update to the locale data has been included, which can potentially affect the data of many users Migrating to rhel8 was being considered, but since locale changes are inevitable, it made an opportunity to have us pivot to ubuntu

refracture 3y ago

Was reneging on CentOS 8's support cycle what led to that Red Hat developer for individuals license that allows 16 hosts? I haven't gotten a good sense of if they introduced that to placate some people or if they had planned on it.

usernamed7 3y ago

i really liked CentOS - it was definitely my goto distro for spinning up a server. Yum is so much saner than what ubuntu is up to. Thankfully now, not something i have to do with as much - i run a website with DB and don't even know what the distro is - a detail i'm glad to leave to abstractions and platforms to manage.

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throwaway0x4 3y ago

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klipklop 3y ago

Too late Red Hat, we already have dumped our CentOS fleet (thousands of hosts) for another distro. Will never trust IBM/RedHat. I was real annoyed as I did a tun of work prepping for a migration to CentOS 8 and then got rug-pulled by IBM with CentOS Stream. They lost all the goodwill just to make a tiny bit more money. Now I am doing everything possible to eliminate RHEL servers. What next will they pull? The longer you depend on them, they more they can charge you later.

eaxrdi 3y ago

that's sad.