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.
“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
---
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...
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.
Hope you understand the frustration.
Cheers
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.
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?
No it isn't. Ubuntu LTS is supported for 5 years.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/what-is-an-ubuntu-lts-release
>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).
CentOS Stream absolutely provides "long term" support.
>ESM is available through an Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure subscription for physical servers, virtual machines, containers and desktops, and is free for personal use.
https://ubuntu.com/security/esm
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.
Thanks, I recognized it first! It should be more clearly advertised.
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".
maybe time to get on with it.
Nevertheless, I'll try to call around to see who can start shortly. :)
not to rub salt into the wound but relying on a single vendor could be considered technical debt.
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.
Being tired and having a different mother tongue has its perks, it seems. :)
The chart looks more like this:
Fedora ---------------------------------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL
It's definitely not "exactly midstream".
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.
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.
CentOS rolling release will still be so slow that itll lag a lot behind Fedora.
Its just that CentOS will now be afew months ahead of RHEL instead of afew months behind RHEL.
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.
Do you mean that it's not 100% Open Source anymore? That you can't build your RHEL anymore?
One thing I don't understand is why they vehemently deny it was the reason.
> 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.
Subjective interpretation is now a basis for downvoting and being labelled flamebait.
Meanwhile the most upvoted comment is about the graphic looking like hairy testicles(which it does).
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.
I kind of get the downvotes.