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Comment by jorl17 | Hacker News Reader

One of our clients pushed us toward AlmaLinux instead of CentOS 7. At the time, we vaguely suggested Rocky Linux, but noted we were kind of still waiting for the future (hence our suggestion of going with CentOS 7 and migrating later to the "true successor" of CentOS).

What is the HN community's perception of this? Is AlmaLinux a good choice? Do you believe Rocky Linux will succeed?

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Nothing wrong with debian minimal. things a beast.

I'd never heard of the company behind Alma before this shambles, while Greg K is pretty well known in the HPC world and as the original CentOS founder. If I had to bet, I'd say 2 years from now adoption of these will be 80/20 in favour of Rocky.

Ubuntu LTS popularity suggests 5 year timeframe is long enough. If people are happy with that, then why not be happy with Centos Stream which is also supported 5 years?

In all likelihood it'll be as solid as it's ever been.

The problem isn't the 5 years. It is the fact that Stream will have packages more towards the leading edge and potentially have more bugs. Then, when a bug is found in a package, RHEL gets the patch first, but then the patch needs to be re-worked to get it to apply against the newer version of the package that is in Stream. I don't know if the wall will still exist between CentOS and RHEL teams, where CentOS won't know of a(n) (embargoed) patch that RHEL has prior to public release. If they don't, then potentially something like Rocky will get the patch before Stream (due to the above mentioned re-working of the patch).

Now if that firewall between the two groups gets some holes poked in it, where Stream can start working with the patch sets prior to release on RHEL, then it may not be such an issue.

> (if) Stream can start working with the patch sets prior to release on RHEL, then it may not be such an issue...

From the chats I had with people who work either on RH or Fedora, CentOS Stream is actually RHEL's next point release's candidate version.

In practicality, CentOS will move from RHEL-1 to RHEL+1 with security patches included.

We're one of the parties get pretty burned by this, but things look better than the start. We'll see.

Are you just guessing that third parties have enough resource to release proper patches quicker?

Not sure what the "rework" is about when a bug is found in Stream, the "rework" is toward older versions of the package in RHEL.

I always wonder how the statements to dismiss Stream is quite weak.

Isn't almalinux some cpanel tainted nasty horror? The base derivative of cloudlinux instead of centos. If you want you can md5 hash your passwords, unsalted and run telnetd too..

I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. My guess is that supporting all the companies who do not want to pay Redhat, for free, is going to push developers way pretty quickly.

Even if I’m wrong I’d still want to see at least two or three solid release before using either in production.

Just use Redhat or switch to Ubuntu. Then you can re-evaluate in five tears time.

> I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over.

While it's possible that CentOS would have failed (I'm not sure slow initial releases actually indicate that), it also wasn't the only popular clone of RHEL in popular use. Scientific Linux (developed by FermiLab) was also popular and in fairly wide use. I doubt Red Hat would have made the change to CentOS that spurred all this if Scientific Linux hadn't decided not to continue and just use CentOS instead in 2019, because instead of a "crap, we have to start a new distro to provide what CentOS did" movement there would have been a much quicker and easier mass exodus to Scientific Linux.

You might be right, there was not stopping Redhat from effectively killing CentOS anymore.

I still don’t want to build anything new on an distro that have still to prove they can maintain the project for two or three release.

The Scientific Linux team decided to not make a Scientific Linux 8, and instead switch over to CentOS 8[0]. Note this was announced prior to the announcement about CentOS 8 going away.

CERN et al are still deciding what to do[1].

[0]: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX...

[1]: https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy

Would Rocky Linux be an option for CERN?

I'm assuming the Centos 8 install instructions for e.g. GitLab also work with Rocky Linux? Conda/Micromamba definitely should.

> CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over...

CentOS had a great backing from supercomputing centers at least (I work for one of them). We'd have supported it with no problems whatsoever if they needed any help.

They're in a pretty good shape even before acquisition. Even CERN has decided to migrate (which is a big deal), as mentioned elsewhere.

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