Red Hat RHEL 9 release
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They made docker hard for regulated environments while making their broken competitor built-in and then marketed theirs as a replacement. This incurs all sorts of costs in schedule + $$$ + reliability where teams are pushed to figuring out if podman works in their case ("why wouldn't it?") + when not, start over with an unnecessarily complicated round of change management steps for enabling docker from centos7.
RHEL/IBM are allowed to use their trusted OS position to be anti-competitive and overall non-neutral for above-OS layers, and to the clear harm of customer. But I am also allowed to say we shouldn't trust & tolerate such a provider for vendor-neutral infra in regulated environments. Secure infra is important and podman is pushing docker on important areas here, so it's been disappointing to see the one-step-forward two-steps-back.
Now just add some RHEL/CentOS containers on top where needed and forget about the RH lock-in.
So if a non-IP-lawyer reads the redistribution terms of the RH Universal Base Images, there are some very dubious implications in there, such as #22 and #42.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#
I'd be just fine avoiding UBI because of that, but there are some orgs whose security posture demands only UBI images are allowed in their domain so ISV's may be forced to pay to play.
RH knows people will try to abuse the free UBI image and install RPMs they shouldn’t be.
I work with Red Hat Partners so I know these rules well.
Meh
That seems fine IMO; use free OSs wherever possible, but if customers want RHEL just pass the cost through and let them deal with it.
The current Debian release cycle is closer to 2 years which means a big increase in testing and OS upgrade cycles.
Debian releases are supported for about half the length of RHEL releases overall, LTS included.
Debian “Stretch” for instance was released in 2017 and support ends 2022, so a 5 year cycle.
RHEL on the other hand has a 10 year cycle, and offers extended support beyond that:
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 8 delivers a ten year life cycle in Full Support and Maintenance Support Phases followed by an Extended Life Phase.”
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/#mas...
With Debian upgrades are realistically being planned every 2-3 years as the release approaches LTS.
That makes for a lot of extra upgrade work (about 3x more) when compared to the 10 year RHEL life cycle.
Exactly; almost nobody wants to maintain old versions like that. For most people, the fun part is writing new stuff, and maintaining old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility is particularly annoying to put up with. I certainly couldn't blame anyone, particularly who was just publishing software for free, for not wanting to deal with all that.
Many people in the CentOS community, even RHEL employees, tried to play it off like they never meant to support it so long, but some time after the announcement they confirmed they did indeed strip away 8 years of the planned support.
This burned a lot of people that had already started deploying systems using CentOS 8 into Production. A lot of time and money has been spent by many people, organizations, and companies rectifying this situation.
This led to several CentOS replacement distros, including Rocky Linux (made by many original CentOS people), AlmaLinux and others. Both Rocky and Alma are supporting 8.x for 10 years, prompting many CentOS users to switch over.
Stream is only "between" fedora and RedHat until RHEL X.0 is released.
For instance, once RHEL 9.0 development branched from fedora 34, Stream 9 became the upstream and just ahead of all further RHEL 9.X releases, and doesn't depend on fedora anymore.
Furthermore all Stream rpms undergo the exact same RHEL testing and quality validation chain than proper RHEL packages.
As such by using Stream 9, you are arguably receiving the bug fixes that are eventually going into RHEL 9 proper, just in advance a bit.
RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.
CentOS Stream would be a perfectly suitable alternative to RHEL9, and in many ways more desirable. And, in a strange way all those people who were being super conservative... more attracted to centos being behind RHEL, as if that made CentOS more stable by being slightly behind... well, that's RHEL now. So.. uh.. maybe just use RHEL instead, since it's now even more conservative? Also, it's important to recognize during all the drama, Red Hat changed their licensing to be pretty much free for small to medium sized operations. So the argument of being cheap, or whatever free value of CentOS is now entirely gone... Red Hat only cares to license from the medium to large.
Wow, what a remarkable offering; they give free users even better service than their paying customers! It's so benevolent of them to give such amazing service away and definitely not use this totally-better product as a beta to ship updates before it gets to the stable users.
/s
Edit: Seriously, though; if a company has 2 almost-identical products and claims that the free product is equal or better than the free product, they're either lying to the free users or defrauding the paying users.
My understanding is the the stream repo sorta rolls forward but leaves behind a trail of X.Y.Z checkpoint repos representing major.minor.batch-number, so that would be like rhel-9.1.0 for the zero-day batch of updates on rhel-9.1
This is a misleading explanation.
CentOS Stream 9 stays between RHEL 9.X and RHEL 9.X+1.
Once branched from Fedora CentOS Stream follows RHEL ABI compatibility of that specific major version and doesn't consume Fedora updates.
It is also tested together with RHEL.
See also https://fosdem.org/2022/schedule/event/centos_stream_stable_...
CentOS Streams is the next X-Release of RHEL. I work with RH Partners and we use Streams as a test platform before we move to QE on Beta and RC builds.
This has been refuted by RH many times. You want to be upset they took away CentOS, that is your choice but spreading incorrect information about Streams is simply misleading.
I'm still waiting a bit longer to see whether I'll keep my toes in the RHEL-ecosystem-waters, or if I finish moving everything to Ubuntu LTS and Debian.
However, I'm worried history will simply repeat itself or RHEL will make downstreaming difficult in some way, which could kill those projects.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/centos-project-leader-k...
So it's not so much that RHEL tried to strong-arm third-party rebuilders of Enterprise Linux - and I don't think it's in their culture to try - but people involved in these projects are always at risk of being bought out. Volunteering for open source can be a lot of work.
It always makes me feel people are making such a big fuss about it being slightly ahead of RHEL than slightly behind which has the benefit of having fixes earlier than RHEL.
If you got a problem, you could always pay for RHEL.
IMHO Debian and Ubuntu are more harmful than Redhat
I always thought Microsoft would end up acquiring Red Hat, but IBM did it instead. Now I think they'll acquire Canonical. I think it's only a matter of time before we'll have a Microsoft Linux.
Microsoft's linux platforms presently run mostly on Ubuntu. You're right that one way out of that dependency would be to buy Canonical. They chose to make their own top level Linux distro instead.
I am baffled by your comment. I can't think of anything that fits.
On both, TBH. :-D
Thats what I heard anyway
RHEL 9 is surprisingly modern, being based on Fedora 34 which itself still has about a month of support remaining.
Lots of things which are otherwise a mess in Linux just weren't.
Of course much of my experience on this was with things like $10k per seat software on a $5k workstation or similar.
One of the reasons containerization is so popular is poorly supported software (on ubuntu mostly) just being broken and hard to work with combined with a pretty bad way to write and manage packages (apt).
Cool, good to know this nearly 30 year old conflict is still just as active as ever. Tens of thousands of working DEB packages notwithstanding.
Anyone smart enough to manage one format can probably manage any of them.
I ran RHEL 7 and 8 workstation when I used to work in engineering / science (not development or comp sci.) and used specialty simulation software and did a lot of Windows emulation via Virtualbox and programming in Octave and Mathematica. I really did enjoy RHEL workstation, and GNOME was a good daily driver. Lot of packages for RHEL (especially with rpm fusion + fusion tainted), although some can be very old. I used it for my 9-5, and even ran a laptop with CentOS. Without the need for specialty simulators, I've converted to the Apple world, though.
Server subscriptions pays the bills for RHEL (governments, banks, large companies, etc.). Is there a real market for "workstation?" Do they development a graphical OS as a community project? Anyone know the future of it? Are there enough paying customers at Universities and defense contractors using workstation that justify development of GNOME, Evolution, graphical programs, etc.?
Would love to hear people's thoughts.
The Linux desktop is Red Hat's complement in the sense of commoditizing their complement. They don't actually care about it as such, but it needs to exist and they want it to be dirt cheap and highly available so it will drive customers to the products they do care about. Without it, they're just selling a grab bag of server/CLI/web-based tools that require a fleet of Windows or Mac desktops to manage, a very different value proposition to being a complete IT solution.
Windows has a big advantage: the prospect has probably personally used the product. Although Red Hat's attempt to replicate that advantage has failed (i.e., the vast majority of IT executives still run Windows on their personal computers), it remains the case that it is advantageous if the RHEL salesman can pull out a laptop running RHEL and show it to the prospect. "Show, don't tell," I believe is a saying among salesmen.
Also, if the salesman's laptop is running RHEL, that is an costly signal to the prospect that Red Hat believes in its product enough to use it to support the IT needs of its salesmen. It is more persuasive than having the saleman tell the prospect, "Yes, my laptop runs Windows, admittedly, but it is communicating with a RHEL server, where all the data I need for my job is actually kept."
Summary: desktop RHEL helps sell server RHEL.
Red Hat gets paid for RHEL 8, they can pay someone to port stuff to Python 2 for their customers if they want it, but I believe the default python there is 3.6, with just an option to install 2.7 if you want it.
> If I had to guess, we may have a [8.6] release sometime this weekend or starting next week as we also continue to work on Rocky 9.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
Which lists the differences between RHEL 8 and 9.
zfs is too good to miss out and Ubuntu makes it so easy to use it.
Ubuntu LTS is all that matters to me.