I too get that IBM wants to milk Red Hat for as much as it as worth. I'd argue Red Hat was lost before that even. It used the good old M$ EEE trick with its the most direct OS competitors (CoreOS/CentOS).
Hail Rocky Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. Red Hat has lost its way.
DISCLAIMER: I worked at Red Hat via an acquisition for a few years.
Thank you to Canonical for keeping Ubuntu a free and open source operating system with long term support! With the death of CentOS (replaced by an unstable upstream of RHEL) it means a lot to the Linux community.
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.
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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.
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>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.
Amen! Ubuntu is amazing! And keeps getting better every release! Big props to the Ubuntu team! My gratitude is endless for not having to use either Windows or Mac and still enjoy the desktop computer experience!
My guess is that it was downvoted because it violates two of the comment guidelines:
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
The parent comment is neither thoughtful nor substantive, merely agreeing with the grandparent -- a verbose equivalent of a "This!" comment. A better comment might include the commenter's reasoning, their experiences with other platforms and their pros and cons, or how they have used Ubuntu personally or professionally, for example.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
The parent's implicit dismissal of Windows or Mac desktop platforms as un-enjoyable could be interpreted as flamebait, since choice of operating system can be a common point of contention.
Hopefully this explanation helps. Since the comment was low-quality but not flagrantly bad, I assume it will pick up one or two downvotes but not a flag, and will sink naturally down the discussion as higher-quality posts supersede it.
I don't think people realize how important a well supported DESKTOP experience is for open source adoption by the mainstream users.
The mainstream doesn't care about zshell or fish shell or vim.
All they see is the graphical desktop experience, for their email or browser.
If that market can be brought into the open source world away from the giant companies that would be a huge win for open source.
And Ubuntu is currently the only real game in town, and having used it myself since v11 or something it's come a long long way, to the point where my grandmother can use it.
That's clear! It's just that many of us have been conditioned by internet snark to read comments like the GP cynically, unless they contain disambiguating information (as your comment here does). You did nothing wrong, but I have a hunch that ambiguity may have been the source of some downvotes.
Colemak user since I taught myself one summer (2012) by spending the first 20 minutes after waking up typing in vim-tutor. I made the switch because I could not stop looking at the keys on QWERTY keyboards no matter what I tried even with blank keys I would look down out of habit. I tried Dvorak and it felt so unnatural. The common key letters for commands were completely in foreign places that I could not get used to at all. After 2 wks of barely getting past 30 wpm on Dvorak I switched to colemak I was able to beat my QWERTY typing speed after only 2 wks of studying and now I can type 200+ words per minutes with over 90% accuracy thinking about spelling slows be down more than anything else.
If you are under 30 I suggest you give an alt keyboard layout a shot. Older than that and the time to learn Colemak/Dvorak vs just improving your QWERTY speed/accuracy might not be worth it.
If you type at 90% accuracy, do you go back through your text to fix all the typos or do rely on some kind of automation to do that for you? I don't type particularly fast, but every time I tried increasing my speed my accuracy suffers sufficiently that going back and correcting mistakes takes more time than typing a bit slower.
200wpm and 90% accuracy is my result from typing tests while using vi-tutor. In real world scenario I would type slower (closer to 120wpm) to be sure I spell and punctuate without having to backspace or use autocorrect.
My experience learning a new keyboard layout was at age 19 an I was not typing for more than a few hours a day.
It takes much longer to both break old habits and form new ones from older ages. If you have been typing for 20+ years in QWERTY and use a keyboard everyday professionally learning a new layout will likely be a very hard and frustrating task. Every time you switch back to QWERTY you are basically reversing the practice you have put in. If you are typing for a profession you likely won't want to suffer months of half your former typing speed or less until you catch up.
I recently left Red Hat (Feb 2021). I joined from the CoreOS acquisition in 2018. For the most part I enjoyed working at Red Hat. Honestly the real reason I left because of GME but there where a few things that convinced me to move:
1) Killing CentOS/CoreOS. Replacing these two stable OSs with unstable upstreams in CentOS Stream/Fedora CoreOS.
2) So many container tools that have overlapping tasks yet perform in completely different manners (podman, buildah, cri-o, skopeo, tekton, openshift, quay, libpod). Interoperability between all these projects was a constant struggle.
3) Forced usage of IRC. I shouldn't have to run my own bouncer to get features like history, push notifications, identity services. I cannot comprehend how in 2021 at a major corporation I would receive irc messages from usernames like "cloudpizza9000" or "m0use" and be expected to know who these people are and take things seriously enough to work together. It seemed like I was in a 90s chat room with a bunch of strangers.
> Forced usage of IRC. I shouldn't have to run my own bouncer to get features like history, push notifications, identity services. I cannot comprehend how in 2021 at a major corporation I would receive irc messages from usernames like "cloudpizza9000" or "m0use" and be expected to know who these people are and take things seriously enough to work together. It seemed like I was in a 90s chat room with a bunch of strangers.
That sounds great! Would love to work for company like that. Meanwhile in my company we are now migrating to Teams from Lync and Slack and general IT infrastructure is usual MS-shitshow...
I'm also in RH. Our team is on Google Chat for some years now. Ironically, I preferred IRC as I could run my own instance of Weechat continuosly on a server and logged all conversations, so could extract information from history by grep et al. The hist search UI in gchat is much more cumbersome.
The older engineering orgs are on IRC, partially because many of the upstream communities were on IRC. It's slowly changing for the same reason (IRC falling out of favor in the broader community).
There's a mix of IRC, Slack, RocketChat, and GChat.
Chat will become the primary method of communication and will be where most work gets done. Other systems will exist sure eventually hackers will build tools for them to be interfaced with via chat clients. This has been happening for many years. Old people need to get over it and stop writing blog posts that basically sound like anti-email rants from 1998.
Maybe I am one of those "old people" but I don't understand how discord is better than more traditional forums or mailing lists for technical discussions. With a mailing list, forum thread, or GitHub issue, I can search and find something relevant to me from years ago. By contrast, discord seems so ephemeral: I have to hope I can be in the same place at the same time as the person who has the information I need. And it's a closed platform, so it's not searchable or indexable the same way as content on the open web. And if discord closes their doors, or changes their TOS in the wrong direction some day it might all just be gone from one day to another. I would be happy to understand why you think chat is a better tool for the job.
If this isn't over by summer 2021 it's time to quarantine the olds an allow the rest of citizens to return to normal life. We gave it a year. we can't go on expecting younger folks to give up all social life, development, sex and so on so old people can sit on Facebook alone at home or in nursing homes.
The young and reckless are why it continues to spread. There have been numerous reports of frat parties and college keggers being super spreader events. They lack discipline.
Only 500 people have died of Covid in the under 24 crowd since Covid started.
They have virtually no risk and they don't crowd hospitals because their symptoms are minimal.
Maybe if the old people who are actually vulnerable to the disease stayed in quarantine instead of going to Starbucks...we could keep the economy going and keep deaths to a minimum and hospitals from overflowing.
A uninformative rant about a software beta. Personally I am tired of these sort of posts that scream about how everything new is terrible because it doesn't have X feature that is super important for "accessibility".
No not every application framework needs to be the same so that your vim extension can work properly.
Beta version of software often ignore users that may have visual or motoric impairment. Plus much of the web is hositle to disabled folks already (like youtube not having closed captions on many popular videos) it's not a good argument against flutter imo.
Hail Rocky Linux and Canonical Ubuntu. Red Hat has lost its way.
DISCLAIMER: I worked at Red Hat via an acquisition for a few years.