Has Rakuten made a Rocky-er road for Red Hat?
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One example for this is their UBI (universal base image) which should be used to build RHEL containers. The image is "free to use" and therefore they removed lots of packages from the included repos. Many packages cannot be installed - with the current version 9 they removed even more packages. This is really frustrating and time consuming.
My recommendation: use Alma or Rocky Linuxes as an alternative
It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have freaked out somehow.
However for security issues it's the other way around - RH won't release security fixes into centos until they've rolled out across all their sold products, even long-term maintenance releases of old OSes. This can take weeks.
End result: many bugs, often broken, and can be missing security fixes for far longer than any sensible user would be comfortable with. It's a product to make facebook (who are the primary user of it) happy essentially, and very little else.
You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they were instant before as a community supported distro.
It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-ce...
I don't know what the actual rate of bugs ended up being; I burned CentOS from my infrastructure when the news dropped.
> It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
Yes, RH is quite attached to their lie that the thing that gets changes before the next stable version of their commercial product isn't a beta. It's unclear to me whether they somehow actually believe this (and if so, why they're giving free users a supposedly better product than paying customers), or if not why they expect anyone else to believe them, but that is indeed their official claim.
Clicking on one of the pages for Rakuten Symphony (https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform) I think I'm even more confused:
"A single platform, where all operational data sits powering real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the operational headcount."
I feel like an entire graduating class of MBAs is kept employed just maintaining this page.
Reads as someone shuffled some buzz words and took a random sample.
But OK, I guess you can't do anything wrong with this approach in MBA land…
Symphony is nothing but a wrapper on top of vendor software from the likes of Mavenir, Nokia, NEC, Altiostar etc. There is not much real engineering done by Rakuten themselves, they just get different vendors under same umbrella and ask them to play nice with each other.
Source: Used to work in Rakuten's Cloud divisions
Sadly looking at their corporate About Page[1] tells me nothing about who they are, when they were founded or who their key people are.
Instead it's all "Why People Choose CIQ" and "Empowering People" type meaningless marketing fluff and I'm none the wiser. That doesn't fill me with confidence.
Then go to bottom of page there is lots of info and a great FAQ and check out the community.
I imagine they want to write “Rocky Linux: Brought to you by CentOS”, but cannot, since they sold the trademark to Red Hat years ago.
https://ciq.co/linux-and-open-source-veterans-sign-on-to-for...
As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming lack of LTS version either currently or planned.
I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS, and generally works Just Fine (TM) except when you fall into something where they are a just a bit too cautious (e.g lack of in-house PHP 8 option in the current Debian Bullseye release - nothing in main repo, nothing in backports, you have to go to an external repo).
I refuse to use Ubuntu because of their increasingly commercial smell. I tried SUSE but always felt a bit uncomfortable with some of its more exotic sysadmin tendencies.
Which kind of leaves me in the market for another LTS platform.
> I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS
In what possible way is Rocky not LTS? Its releases have longer lifespan than Debian, even with Debian LTS releases
Sorry, that took a bit long to get to the point that these days I only use Redhat because it's the only linux distro available at my job. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe IBM is just realizing no one gets joy from using RedHat anymore, so they might as well squeeze every bit of money out of it before it dies.
But desktop support still exists? https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
I think she let you return it because she didn't want to hear anymore about open source.
RHEL's docs are simply unparalleled in the Linux world. I only wish search was better, but if required I can download them and use my own search anyways.
I don’t know, for a pet server this might not be as dumb an idea as it sounds (though without automatic updates, obviously). Perhaps with aconfmgr[1]?
I haven’t done it in anger, but over seven years of running Arch on a personal server I’ve had a total of three instances of breakage: upstream strongSwan systemd integration change[2] (when using a config format they’ve considered deprecated for years), upstream nftables parsing bug[3] (I knew in advance that nftables is for adventurous people), and upstream Kea config format change[4] (and, well, Kea really bloody sucks—suggestions for anything else that can do DHCPv6 PD welcome). All of those resulted in the relevant service failing to work at all and would’ve been caught by a reasonable staging environment. My (Arch) GNOME desktop broke much more frequently during that time.
[1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr
[2] https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Changel..., first item
[3] https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/commit/?id=638af0ceb2b223...
[4] https://kb.isc.org/docs/en/upgrading-to-kea-16, third item
I guess nobody is seriously using Arch as a server OS in production. So this is kind of comparing apples to oranges, sure.
But Arch's documentation is indeed one of the best around!
I'm a die hard Debian user since forever but for the last years I don't even bother to try to find anything in the abysmally bad Debian docs. I go straight to the Arch wiki (or to the Gentoo one for even more in depth docu on internal aspects of Linux software).
Contrary to that I've almost never found anything of value in the RedHat docs (that wasn't RedHat specific).
If the Arch wiki would expand on some things that are more related to running servers in production it would be the Linux documentation.
The overall quality and general applicability of Arch's docu is already unparalleled, imho.
Reminder, to stay true to the trope: I'm not using Arch Linux (as such) for anything.
Devuan is OK, though apt-get upgrade broke grub on one of my machines.
I settled on manjaro. I kind of hate it, but at least it sort of works. In particular, I have it on a shared desktop, and “switch user” works.
It took 3-4 hours to get xscreensaver to work (poorly) with multiple sessions. There’s no way to save games in micropolis (open source simcity) because it is a flatpack. I frequently reboot because PulseAudio is still terrible.
Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
I want Debian circa 2002 back. sigh
There are lots of instructions available for de-SystemD'ing debian. You could try one of those.
> Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
Via running a Linux userland with syscall emulation. Since the GUI and user session stuff in FBSD is mostly the same as Linux (DRM/KMS for graphics, libinput and the xf86 DDX drivers, logind/ConsoleKit for session tracking, D-Bus for IPC) so I don't think this will address many grievances...
> I want Debian circa 2002 back.
Did display managers back then even support running multiple concurrent X servers on the same seat?
I thought they were recompiling proton for freebsd (it is definitely open source), but I haven't looked carefully.
The "switch user" button is one feature. Whether or not Debian had it in 2002 isn't the point. The point is that what was supported was stable. That hasn't been my experience with it since the pulse audio disaster, and then the init wars.
I should look into switching to pipewire, but the only reason I'm using manjaro is that it mostly works out of the box. I'm not really interesting using a distro that makes me tinker with it to make my sound card (which has perfectly good drivers!) stable.
Personally I think this news is a huge one for Linux and RHEL based users community in general. This is the main reason why FSF's GPL is a great license for open source software.
According to the article not only the Rocky Linux becomes the natural successor for CentOS, it also added the real-time capability to RHEL based clones, and all it's done with the collaboration with the Linux community. This looks to me like a RHEL distro on steroid and before long there will be tens if not hundreds of books using the Rocky Linux in its title descriptions.
The news page goes back about two years: https://rockylinux.org/news/2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten
Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I doubt it very much, just look at the struggles many open-source communities have with these large companies sucking blood from them over the years (openssh,openssl, ntp...) It is Halloween today, had to get a some kind of spooky over the top reference in :)
Red Hat should've gone with the Ubuntu model instead and maybe even change to usage based pricing instead of a yearly subscription too, IMO.
How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get, everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?
For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing business. Charge accordingly.
Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription. You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions to cover those.
As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few pixels if you are running an X server like xming in multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of a window.
The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft OS.
Also, if some country/university thinks out loud about ditching Windoze for Linus desktops they get a huge discount -- so MS takes it serious.
> Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways
I expect you are using OSX (or what ever it is called nowadays), which is a more polished desktop product, and usable by devs.
If you are on windows: you do not take Linux desktop serious enough. If you are on a Linux desktop: you forgot to count yourself. :)
ChromeOS and Android are nice but are not desktop user interfaces.
I do have a Macbook Pro but only use it for testing purposes. It works well but I only use it for running Safari so can't really say how it works for a power user.
The underlying OS and command line world is sooo much more stable than Windows.
I agree KDE3 was the most stable Linux experience (I'm with a few small adventures still a KDE user).
Expecting devs who work primarily on Linux to install a completely different OS and spent a few hours configuring it in a particular way, to work on an issue which is neither relevant to their own interests as FOSS devs, nor relevant to their employer, doesn't seem entirely reasonable.
If someone came along and fixed the bug, submitted a PR, did all the legwork and then it was still left to languish anyway then you would have a reasonable complaint. Could you provide a bit more context?
In Fedora, it is growing more pervasive by the day.
In RHEL, any implementation absolutely will not be supported, full stop.
I would hazard to say that is probably because they haven't experienced any requests for the filesystem from their customer base. If customers started specifically asking for it, I think that would change.
I mentioned that I was using btrfs loopback mounts, and they confirmed that these are explicitly unsupported.
Even when running the UEK (i.e. for ksplice), this is not allowed, and they must be removed in a support event if they have any impact at all.
I mean, they're giving away Rocky for free, so...
EDIT: Although in hindsight, yes I should have phrased that a little differently.
> Amin teamed up with one of CentOS’ founders, Greg Kurtzer. Apparently the two have been working together for 13 months to build a real-time kernel to run complex workloads and complies with the Linux open source community.
So Rakuten owns CIQ which created Rocky Linux?