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Comment by josefx | Hacker News Reader

Edit: I have been corrected on the support time frame. Also had the bad luck of checking the CentOS wikipedia page to validate my memories - one of the Tables makes it look as if both CentOS stream 8 and 9 are already out of support.

As far as I can tell IBM officially nuked CentOS long term support in the same step it killed Red Hat compatibility with 7 being the last supported version.

The replacement for CentOS seems to be Rockit Linux, which continues with tracking Red Hat packages like CentOS did in the past.

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That is not true.

CentOS Stream is just as "LTS" as Debian, Ubuntu, or OpenSUSE - supported for 5 years. This is admittedly not as generous as the 10 years CentOS provided previously (and what Alma / Rocky linux have promised to provide), but it's definitely still "long term" by the same definition everyone else uses.

And while CentOS Stream {8,9} does trend slightly ahead of RHEL {8,9} respectively in terms of bugfixes and features, it still maintains equivalent ABI with RHEL {8,9} and is compatible, though not precisely "bug-for-bug" compatible, which even CentOS / Alma / Rocky have never quite accomplished.

disclosure: I work for Red Hat

That is probably what I get for checking my assumptions against wikipedia. One of the tables on the CentOS page makes it looks as if only CentOS 7 is still supported. On a closer check the table may just be incomplete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS

Oof, that table is very wrong. Even the release date for 8-stream is wrong. Thanks for pointing this out.

I always looked upon Scientific Linux as the CentOS replacement.

https://scientificlinux.org/

Scientific Linux was killed in 2019 although security releases for SL 6 and 7 will probably continue as long as Centos 6 and 7 get them. I'd go with AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux if you want to something that's a free copy of RHEL 8 or 9

CERN chose to move forward with AlmaLinux: https://linux.web.cern.ch/which/

That's mostly replaced by Alma with the CERN repository: https://linux.web.cern.ch/which/

RockyLinux is by the guy who did CentOS, and seeks to follow it's principles.

Scientific Linux is no longer a thing, essentially; from wikipedia:

> In April 2019, it was announced that feature development for Scientific Linux would be discontinued, but that maintenance will continue to be provided for the 6.x and 7.x releases through the end of their life cycles. Fermilab and CERN will utilize CentOS Stream[4] and AlmaLinux[5] for their deployment of 8.x release instead.

> RockyLinux is by the guy who did CentOS, and seeks to follow it's principles.

Not quite. Back in 2003, when folks were first coming up with the idea of creating a distro that matched RHEL as closely as possible, Greg Kurtzer (the Rocky founder) explicitly stated that he would be interested in helping host it, but that he was "totally not interested" in leading it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040909231336/http://www.caosit...

It wasn't until much later (~2019) that he started trying to retcon history by claiming he was the original CentOS founder.

Rockit?

Oracle Linux 7 is guaranteed binary compatible with RHEL/CentOS 7, although there is only (a little over) a year of support left on the whole platform.

Scientific Linux was also on v7, but I thought there was some kind of ongoing apoptosis with this repackaged distro.

Neither Alma nor Rocky implemented v7. I thought that CentOS left that version untouched.

I wonder if the Oracle UEK has addressed these problems. If so, it would be a reason to run Oracle's kernel on CentOS, supported or not.

For those poeple who can tolerate neither these bugs nor Oracle's kernel, another option is ElRepo's "Kernel of Last Resort."

"We stress that we consider such kernels as a last resort..."

http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml

UEK can run into the same issue. It is just a picked upstream kernel with a bunch of stuff that Oracle cares about dropped on top of it, and managed by a much smaller team.

It can run into the same issue, but they are all v5 kernels.

Rhel7 is running a v3 kernel; the UEK will have a lot less to do.

I will admit that they are with a few point releases on rhel9.

How many people maintain elrepo-ml?

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