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Comment by pinewurst | Hacker News Reader

It's easy enough to suggest "just use Rocky" but Rocky doesn't exist beyond a collective promise. What about production now, or in the next few months?

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You could say the same about CentOS 8. There is no contract guaranteeing support-just a collective promise that was broken in a single day.

At the end of the day, you are looking for a free distro and this is what you can get. If you want a guarantee, pay for a contract. You have the right to sue if it is broken.

Edit: grammar.

There is also AlmaLinux [0], expected to be available in Q1 2021.

[0] https://almalinux.org/

I believe CentOS images are still available and supported as much as they were before through the rest of this year, fwiw.

Agreed. But Rocky is supposed to launch before CentOS 8 is EOL. There should be time to wait and migrate.

> What about production now, or in the next few months?

Pay for RHEL, use CentOS 7, or switch to Ubuntu.

Or scrap all three and start using *BSD.

This seems more and more to be the reality we are moving towards. Been dabbling with FreeBSD lately and it just works. Also, ports are updated or new submitted quite often making it feel less out of date.

That's not a decision you make and then train staff + switch in a short time. At least not beyond trivial deployments. People used CentOS so they don't have to deal with this and they will have other less-extreme options before CentOS EOL.

Even though it sounds bad, Oracle Linux works surprisingly well

It's not just that it sounds bad, you'd have to be willing to sell your soul to the devil.

As I remarked to a RH employee when the CentOS 8 discontinuation came out - do you have any idea how much trust you have to burn that people are considering Oracle as the good option?

RH would have minded. IBM doesn't. They may even take being compared to Oracle as a compliment.

I have heard my share of "at least we aren't Oracle" while I was at IBM :)

That reminds me of Animal Farm.

What's the specific difference between Oracle and IBM/RedHat in this regard? As far as I can tell Oracle has burned a lot of people because they don't do license checks in their software (no DRM of any kind), which is usually what the HN crowd wants. But the flip side is they have to check you in some other way, leading to audits, and audits are very painful.

Is the difference that RHEL does subscription checks so they don't need to audit customers so much?

In terms of open source contributions, RH certainly do more, but Oracle are no slouch. They're doing actually exciting stuff with GraalVM and I don't really remember the last time I saw Red Hat do anything describable as research, their Java stewardship has been pretty responsible, they publish quite a lot of useful tools and stuff.

This page has some interesting details: https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/

Whats wrong with Centos Stream?

... you know, I had actually forgotten about that as an actual option. Yes, some people would probably be fine running Stream. I personally would avoid it because you're sacrificing stability by beta-testing Red Hat's software for them, but it is free, it is close to CentOS 8 (RIP), and it is likely to be good enough™ for many uses.

Are there any actual reports of instability of Stream? I mean, it's _barely_ ahead of RHEL/odl CentOS.

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