Hacker News Reader

Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors.

The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.

View on HN

> The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.

Same story as an Ubuntu user. Actually, doesn't everyone go to the Arch wiki? :D

Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.

Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing!

(Nix is a package manager for Linux.)

Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.

If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.

I always wondered why its not n*x

Fair enough

> CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.

In fairness, that's kind of the point of CentOS et al.

You can just go to the RHEL docs. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

There are plenty of RHEL docs that will show up in a search but are inaccessible because it's hidden behind a login.

That's not documentation that's support knowledgebase. You can just pay for a single subscription at 349$/yr and get access to it. It's worth it if you are running a large fleet.

Upvoting because you are correct that the documentation is freely available and it’s only the knowledge-base that requires an account. However, there can be some very useful information in the knowledge-base, e.g., resolutions to problems that don’t have a readily available answer anywhere else on the Internet. If you’re not running a large fleet, a cheaper option is to sign up for a developer account which costs nothing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com