3 ms·

Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.

by BSDobelix 2y ago

justinclift 2y ago
Yeah. It's super ironic. ;)
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  It absolutely is, kind of unreal ;)
  - ghaff 2y ago
    It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      In hindsight I wish I'd told KB "No, don't do it" at the meeting prior to them joining. :/
      - ghaff 2y ago
        For a public forum, let's just say there was a long history of expedient decisions which I had no hand in but many of us regret :-/ Understandable but there were almost certainly better paths.
nordsieck 2y ago
> Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux. Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle?
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle? You don't, if Oracle does something fishy you go to your bank take at least 2500$ and above that, 25$/y/instance and switch to "Liberty" Linux ;) But comparing the reliability and not giving up on their "Free Enterprise Linux" Oracle (since 2006) [1] is funnily by far the best. SUSE: openSUSE Leap is dead RH: Centos (not stream) is dead Alma: We are Centos-Stream Rocky: Too early to say anything about longstanding promises EuroLinux: Pfff [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux
  - eraser215 2y ago
    CentOS stream is red hat.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - lye 2y ago
    Oracle also was the first to release updates last time I compared the three of them side by side, which was about a year ago. I installed Rocky, Alma and Oracle 9 on three VMs, pointed them as close to upstream repositories as possible (to avoid mirroring delays), and just started them every day to see who was the first to update. I also checked RPM metadata which includes build time. The experiment ran for (IIRC) about two months. Oracle was consistently the first, lagging behind RHEL for a few hours (for important stuff) to a couple of days (for less important ones). Alma was a very close second. Rocky would spend days to weeks and was by far the slowest. No, I don't buy the argument that it's good for you because they receive additional testing. If you really need that much stability that you can't take an update after RHEL has done so, introduce your own delays and test your shit on staging. I'd like my upstream to be as quick as practically possible. Oracle and Alma cover that nicely. All this might have changed in the meantime.
bboozzoo 2y ago
Is Oracle committed to actually supporting the distro with security updates and so on? I was under the impression that it's simply a bug-for-bug compatibility rebuild from RHEL sources, which aside from rebuilding effort, the majority of support work was still done by RH.
- lye 2y ago
  It's a rebuild with a few more patches on top (like ksplice). If you need a RHEL rebuild, they're the first to release security updates of any of the rebuilds I've tested. See my other comment for more info. I wish they would add ZFS to it.
Twirrim 2y ago
That'll only buy you several months. IIRC OL7 EOL issue in December, unless you pay for extended support while you do your work to transition to a newer OS (please, please don't rely on extended support, unless desperate, switch to new versions.)
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  True but gives you some additional time, and yes don't rely on ext. support, neither from RH nor Oracle. It just gets harder and harder to upgrade, as i wrote further down my preferred upgrade time-frame is 3-5 years max.

Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.

justinclift 2y ago

Yeah. It's super ironic. ;)

BSDobelix 2y ago
It absolutely is, kind of unreal ;)
- ghaff 2y ago
  It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    In hindsight I wish I'd told KB "No, don't do it" at the meeting prior to them joining. :/
    - ghaff 2y ago
      For a public forum, let's just say there was a long history of expedient decisions which I had no hand in but many of us regret :-/ Understandable but there were almost certainly better paths.

nordsieck 2y ago

> Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux. Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle?

BSDobelix 2y ago
>Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle? You don't, if Oracle does something fishy you go to your bank take at least 2500$ and above that, 25$/y/instance and switch to "Liberty" Linux ;) But comparing the reliability and not giving up on their "Free Enterprise Linux" Oracle (since 2006) [1] is funnily by far the best. SUSE: openSUSE Leap is dead RH: Centos (not stream) is dead Alma: We are Centos-Stream Rocky: Too early to say anything about longstanding promises EuroLinux: Pfff [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux
- eraser215 2y ago
  CentOS stream is red hat.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- lye 2y ago
  Oracle also was the first to release updates last time I compared the three of them side by side, which was about a year ago. I installed Rocky, Alma and Oracle 9 on three VMs, pointed them as close to upstream repositories as possible (to avoid mirroring delays), and just started them every day to see who was the first to update. I also checked RPM metadata which includes build time. The experiment ran for (IIRC) about two months. Oracle was consistently the first, lagging behind RHEL for a few hours (for important stuff) to a couple of days (for less important ones). Alma was a very close second. Rocky would spend days to weeks and was by far the slowest. No, I don't buy the argument that it's good for you because they receive additional testing. If you really need that much stability that you can't take an update after RHEL has done so, introduce your own delays and test your shit on staging. I'd like my upstream to be as quick as practically possible. Oracle and Alma cover that nicely. All this might have changed in the meantime.

bboozzoo 2y ago

Is Oracle committed to actually supporting the distro with security updates and so on? I was under the impression that it's simply a bug-for-bug compatibility rebuild from RHEL sources, which aside from rebuilding effort, the majority of support work was still done by RH.

lye 2y ago
It's a rebuild with a few more patches on top (like ksplice). If you need a RHEL rebuild, they're the first to release security updates of any of the rebuilds I've tested. See my other comment for more info. I wish they would add ZFS to it.

Twirrim 2y ago

That'll only buy you several months. IIRC OL7 EOL issue in December, unless you pay for extended support while you do your work to transition to a newer OS (please, please don't rely on extended support, unless desperate, switch to new versions.)

BSDobelix 2y ago
True but gives you some additional time, and yes don't rely on ext. support, neither from RH nor Oracle. It just gets harder and harder to upgrade, as i wrote further down my preferred upgrade time-frame is 3-5 years max.