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Comment by MattSteelblade | Hacker News Reader

Due to the discontinuation of Centos 8 and these manufactured obstacles faced by RHEL derivatives, I am strongly considering migrating our systems to Debian.

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Go for it. I hope lots of people switch to Debian and help support its development. If RHEL isn't compelling enough to pay for, then Debian is great and available for free and that community isn't trying to make a profit. So IMO everybody wins in that scenario.

If you are paying for RHEL and are willing to switch on principle, then tell your sales rep that, too. If enough RHEL customers drop RHEL for this reason, that'll have an impact.

But if your business is using a RHEL clone because you want what RHEL provides, but for free, then consider paying for RHEL. Or go ahead and switch to Debian and see if the costs associated with switching and staying on top of a community driven distro outweigh what you save not paying for RHEL.

Debian have a document here about all the different ways that you can help us with money or time etc:

https://www.debian.org/intro/help

I think those that were using CentOS for stability would do well to switch to Debian Stable. It will give more users and testers to the Debian project, which can only help to grow the Linux community (as scattered as it may be). I know there were a lot of sysadmins that used CentOS because they understood the system enough not to need support from Red Hat and RHEL.

Do it. Even if it's somewhat painful now, seems like it'll be much cheaper long term. This is the second major surprise we're seeing from Red Hat's side over the last couple of years. It's quite likely you'll have to migrate somewhere soon anyway (for the second time in as many years), and it might as well be a community-supported distribution that has never pulled any similar tricks over its multi-decade lifetime (as it is not dominated by any single corporate entity, or really any corporate entities at all).

FreeBSD is another solid server OS if you don't need anything that specifically requires Linux.

> Under the current support model, each major version’s stable branch is explicitly supported for 5 years, while each individual point release is only supported for three months after the next point release.

It's also easier to upgrade between FreeBSD major releases than RHEL and clones.

https://www.freebsd.org/security/

I have already seen a ton of vendors that once only has RHEL certifications for their software switch to having RHEL and Debian or Ubuntu Certifications for deployment

Clearly the enterprise market is moving, as once in the US every vendor would mainly only support RHEL, now I am seeing most support both RHEL and Debian\Ubuntu

I don't understand why anyone that would consider switching to Debian has problems with CentOS Stream. They have the same release model / policy.

Possibly due to a misunderstanding of Debian, they probably think the release lifecycle is similar to Ubuntu LTS or RHEL.

CentOS Stream seems to be more like stable + proposed-updates than just stable.

Every update that goes into CentOS Stream is not a "proposed update", it is an update that has gone through the entire QA process and is scheduled to go into the next RHEL minor release. It's the same as Debian, except that Debian has no other "more stable" point release branch, it just has the one that updates flow into after being tested.

I might be misunderstanding what you're saying, but Debian Stable has LTS versions, which will give you your stable system for a longer period of time.

I've already done this after cent7, no regrets so far.

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