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Comment by derkoe | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat makes things worse for paying customers to sell more subscriptions which will fail in the end.

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

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Serious question but why aren't people comfortable with CentOS?

It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have freaked out somehow.

Because the thing that centos has morphed into isn't terribly useful. It gets most updates early, and as a result has many bugs, which often take a good while to get fixed.

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.

Do you have references for "many bugs, often broken" or are you exaggerating?

You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they were instant before as a community supported distro.

My source comes from watching the IRC channels every single day, and seeing what users complain about and how long it takes to get fixed, compared to before the switch to stream. And for important security fixes there's a huge change - I've seen upwards of two weeks for kernel vulns in 8-stream that would have been O(hours) previously.

People used CentOS to get a perfectly stable OS for free. Beta testing releases for RH runs contrary to that usecase.

Practically how is that damaging your use case by using CentOS stream? Do you see many things being unstable?

It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.

https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-ce...

> Practically how is that damaging your use case by using CentOS stream? Do you see many things being unstable?

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.

UBI images work fine for many use cases, and importantly, they're free to redistribute, not just use. If you're selling a containerized software solution to people, it might make sense to use the UBI as it will get real security updates, etc.

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