I fail to see how moving to a rolling release strategy results in any kind of "death", seems like FUD to me. Rolling release, trying to stick to upstream releases as closely as possible, works well with Arch Linux, I'm glad CentOS learned from Arch Linux success. DISCLAMER: I'm not even a CentOS user, but I just like what RH does and has done for "the Linux community" as you call it (I would just call it "society" but whatever).
“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite
Hey: Please read the answer to this comment first. It contains some very important clarifications. Leaving the comment up for completeness, context and admittance of error. Happy reading.
---
Disclaimer: We use CentOS on almost all of our servers at production level for 10+ years.
The main problem with CentOS is not moving into a rolling release schedule, but change of its place in the ecosystem.
Before, CentOS was the last tier. Fedora was testing ideas, RedHat was implementing them, and CentOS was following the trail by porting them later. There was an unwritten agreement that RedHat didn't prevent CentOS' development, and CentOS didn't port everything at day 1, so they were in a mutualistic state. Moreover, CentOS enjoyed a ~10 year support on every release, so it was the soul-successor of the original RedHat from the olden times.
Now, CentOS moved to pre-RH position. So Fedora experiments, CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support.
This is problematic for many places since CentOS was the RPM Equivalent of Debian Stable. Now, there's no RedHat based free and community-driven and community-supported distro. People who can't use CentOS in its future state will either migrate to RedHat or to Ubuntu or Debian Stable.
For us, and for other data centers which do the same thing as us, current situation is a very big let's wait and see game.
For the health of the ecosystem, we need another fully free (as in beer & as in speech) and fully supported distribution. Hope Rocky can fill that void.
I'll continue to use Debian on my personal systems, for foreseeable future.
>CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support.
This isn't correct.
Debian Testing is a true rolling release distribution for the next "major" version of Debian. If you install Debian testing, what you're getting is a hybrid between Debian N and Debian N+1, with package versions that at any point in time may or may not be similar to those in _either_ Debian N or Debian N+1, since they get continually updated up until the stabilization phase.
That is not what CentOS Stream is.
CentOS Stream is a rolling release for the next minor (_not_ major) release of RHEL, and follows the same development process, including the exact same CI and testing scrutiny that was required to update a package in RHEL internally. It's basically taking the development process which used to be internal, and opening it up to everyone else.
Unlike Debian Testing, CentOS Stream is _not_ a hybrid between major releases of RHEL (say, RHEL 8 and RHEL 9). It's frozen to a major release. So CentOS Stream 8 will track the development of RHEL 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and so on, and CentOS Stream 9 will track the development of RHEL 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and so on. And like both RHEL and current CentOS, that means that the updates will only fall into the categories of backported bugfixes, security fixes, support for new hardware, and on very rare occasions individual backported features.
This is more significantly stable than Debian Testing - it is less "Debian Testing meets Arch" but rather "old CentOS meets Debian Testing".
Where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That is not true...
Daniel, thanks for the comment and clarifications in (Googled your twitter account for your first name, hope that's OK).
Actually, the initial communication of this issue was so vague from our perspective, so this is what I and my colleagues understood.
Again, thanks for clarifying, because I personally don't want to bash CentOS, but want to understand what's happening and continue to use it. Maybe it would be beneficial to disseminate this in a more visible and more understandable way.
> And further - where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That false...
I didn't hear, but as I said, CentOS Stream was presented as a proving-grounds distribution and, I understood that it'll receive security updates in a best-effort basis.
The news came in a crashing way and the initial roadmap didn't communicated well to the outside world in the beginning. To be frank, a lot of people felt betrayed by IBM/RH. When a company announces a big paradigm shift and cuts the support for the latest release at the end of the year without further explanation besides marketing speak, thinking otherwise is pretty hard.
I just wanted to be kind, sincere, and asked his permission explicitly in my comment I presume. At least it was my intention.
If he wanted me to remove it, I would have happily done so.
Also, I just pasted his nick to Google and it came on top. So I presume he didn’t try to hide his name. If I have sensed the contrary, I would not dig one step further.
"Asking for permission", while simultaneously doing the thing you're asking permission for, without waiting for a response, is not actually asking for permission.
> where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That is false...
It's not false under the context of long term support which is why I highlighted so in the OP. How long will each CentOS Stream release be supported? How long with each CentOS Stream release receive security patches?
5 years is half of the Ubuntu LTS and the previous CentOS Linux lifecycle. This is why many consider CentOS Stream to be a significant departure from CentOS Linux. Not saying it is a bad OS but it is no longer a free Linux operating system with long term support.
>An Ubuntu LTS is a commitment from Canonical to support and maintain a version of Ubuntu for five years.
---
>Not saying it is a bad OS but it is no longer a free Linux operating system with long term support.
Ubuntu LTS is suppored for 5 years, Debian Stable is supported for 5 years, and OpenSUSE Leap is supported 5 years (as far as I can tell - the only documentation I found said "up to" 60 months).
Ubuntu LTS has an additional 5 years of security support through Extended Security Maintenance thus giving LTS releases a full 10 year lifecycle. https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
>ESM is available through an Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription for physical servers, virtual machines, containers and desktops, and is free for personal use.
Note that if you click through "personal use" means "up to 3 machines" and obviously doesn't apply to infrastructure. RHEL has free "personal use" subscriptions too, except they apply to up to 16 machines.
And also:
> Initially, free subscription is available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS only.
The fact is if someone wants to run a Linux host for 10 years with security patches they can with Ubuntu. They cannot with CentOS Stream. Yes, they could switch to RHEL and pay for security patches but RHEL is a different OS than CentOS Stream.
Why don't people make the effort to just move to Debian Stable? If you don't want to pay any money, relying on Redhat's goodwill always seemed precarious.
Because there's a big software stack from drivers to scientific software which is being developed for 10+ years (or even longer) for RH based distributions, or for CentOS/ScientificLinux specifically
Software development and verification is huge in scientific computing. It's not just "Meh, let's port it in a weekend and be done with it".
I think this applies to the whole community. For many years we just assumed we could runt CentOS forever. When RH bought them there was an initial shock but they quickly clarified CentOS is not going anywhere so we were happy. Now that it's gone I kind of regret I didn't insisted or at least kindly asked some vendors for Debian compatibility. I didn't because I didn't have to, an now we're all screwed.
I think you just made a new malapropism by getting the "sole" in "sole successor" mixed up with the homophone "soul" and then relating it to "spiritual successor"
Both "sole successor" and "spiritual successor" are accurate descriptions in this case, so it works beautifully.
For many, the reason to use CentOS was that it was stable and supported for 10 years. They killed that and personally I agree with the GP that they have probably killed CentOS along with it. CentOS Stream is "positioned as a midstream between Fedora Linux and RHEL". I'm not sure who this will appeal to but it's not the same group as before.
CentOS Stream is getting the exact same types of updates that it got before, just incrementally rather than bundled up into minor releases every 6 months.
It's semantically correct. CentOS is the name of a Linux distribution, and that Linux distribution is dead. CentOS 8 is the last ever version of CentOS, and it's supported for for 8 more months.
There's a new Linux distribution called CentOS Stream, but it's not the same distribution as CentOS, and it doesn't have the same goals of CentOS. It would be correct to say that CentOS is being replaced by CentOS Stream, but that means that CentOS is no more.
You may argue that this is pedantic though, and that the phrase "the death of CentOS" is intended to communicate something which isn't accurate. And, yeah, that might be the case.
Centos was mainly used as a "free but otherwise identical" alternative to RHEL. Centos typically attracted an incredibly conservative and stability-focussed crowd. People who wanted all the benefits of a stable enterprise distro but who didn't want to pay and who didn't need support.
Whatever your personal preferences are, it's obvious that this change doesn't fit well with that crowd.
Red Hat has every right do do that change, but we shouldn't pretend that this is a good fit for the traditional centos crowd.
eh, honestly centos is one of the few distros where you can get fairly recent compilers even on old versions, much more easily than ubuntus / debians. e.g. even on centos 7 (released in 2009)
The move is pretty transparent to me, when CentOS was effectively "free RHEL" many people who didn't feel they needed support just ran CentOS in lieu of RHEL knowing that they'd get near-100% compatibility without paying a dime.
The fact that it's a rolling release is not really the problem per-se, it's more that you can no longer expect that CentOS n == RHEL n. It's not a drop-in replacement. You can't expect that something that works in RHEL will work in CentOS and vice-versa.
For people who ran CentOS because they liked it over the competition it may not be a deal breaker. For people like me who only used it because it was "free RHEL" the new rolling version is effectively useless. And I'm 100% certain that it's exactly what RedHat/IBM counted on: no more free candy, just buy a license.
“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite