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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them.

If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.

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If you've read the article, its clearly stated that many more people were just using CentOS as free RHEL, never needing to pay anything because it gives them everything they need for free.

It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.

> It wasn't worth putting up with so many free users for a paid product, just to have a small minority actually pay anything.

It used to be worth it for 20+ years. Now something changed.

For my servers I used to use 95% centos, 5% rhel. Now I’ll use 0% rhel.

I didn’t need support for most servers but I liked having comparability for when things grew into needing it.

Have you considered the developer team license, the UBI, CentOS Stream? If none of them work for you, either there is a hole that Red Hat would like to be closed or you were already violating the support agreement.

Probably the reason is licensing is a pain, and its not true "zero-cost" in that case. CentOS then Rocky/Alma removed that issue.

RH doesn't understand this.

Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?

Or Fedora.

Last time I tried Fedora was FC35. I came back a few months later and tried to build a kernel module, I couldn't get the RPM's for kernel-devel and kernel-headers to line up correctly.

It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.

CentOS stream isn't stable, it's a rolling distro. That's like asking "why can't people running RHEL go to Arch Linux or OpenSuSE TumbleWeed?"

Oh come on, the idea that CentOS stream is on par with arch, tumbleweed, and fedora is ludicrous.

Either you don't understand what CentOS stream is, or you're being ridiculously hyperbolic.

From an infrastructure operator's point of view, there's no practical difference.

Do everyday people need an enterprise Linux distro? Why not use one of their other everyday-people focused distributions?

Valid notion. I don't really know the impact to top of funnel, but it seems like such a gamble to me to tighten the pipeline so much, exclude so many from starting.

It's starting to change, but for years people would look at me like I was crazy for running Debian/unstable aka Debian/sid on my machines/personal servers. Being willing to have volatile systems is a big barrier. Only having "dogfood this wip" or "pay us" as the two options is a radical ask, one that doesn't really seem survivable to me (rh/centos won't go away, but their mindshare seems likely to implode to me).

Speaking for myself, I have a home server. I bought it almost 9 years ago, and the server (haswell-grade xeon) is still perfectly ok for home-server stuff, like a NAS and plex. When I set up the server, I picked CentOS 7 because I wanted a simple, boring OS that got updates for a long time. Sure, I could have used Debian or Ubuntu, and done an OS upgrade every 3-5 years, but I just wanted to avoid it.

Last year, with RH cancelling CentOS, I switched to Rocky expecting another 8+ years of updates. We'll see how that pans out.

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