There are so many alternatives to CentOS and RHEL that their absence is inconsequential.
Their 'support' largely consists of
a) giving ridiculously small and unchangeable /home and /usr partition sizes,
b) randomly logging in at unannounced times to add more logging and monitoring tools in to /home and /usr (then rebooting, also unannounced),
c) sending sporadic emails telling us to clean up our system because we are dangerously low on drive space in /home and /usr.
Got a message the other day stating that they power down our machine in 2 days unless we freed up drive space because 'low drive space can impact system availability and security'. Powering it down also impacts availability, but that point seemed lost on them.
EDIT: Realizing now that ... our RHEL 7 will expire at end of month. We've had 0 communication from them about this. Annoyed because when I'd requested this machine back in 2021, asking for RHEL 8, I was told "we don't officially support that", and now we're going in to EOL territory because of RHEL 7. I'm expecting an "hair on fire" email in early July indicating our machines will be shut down shortly without an immediate upgrade, that we will be forced to do ourselves (because upgrades fall outside 'support').
possible good news is that we'd been forced to use more machines a few years ago due to some IT policy about databases not being colocated on the same physical instance as the application(s) accessing it, which forced multiple servers when fewer were needed. I was told that's not a hard requirement any longer, which may allow us to consolidate some pieces during a rebuild.
A change like this for thousands of bare metal machines, is not inconsequential. The complete inverse is true, in fact.
I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.
But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.
However this is where we're now and what we have to go through.
> they deserve what they get.
Why the anger though?
Centos 7 was released in 2014 and the support ends next week.
Debian 10 was released in 2019 and the support also ends next week.
Also, you can re-install a cattle worker node in 10 minutes or less, from power on.
For example, Debian has finished two big transitions recently. Merging /usr and 64 bit time support. Both are done on testing, and even on testing nothing has broken.
Another big change (which also made HN front page via LWN) was /tmp behavior change. It's handled differently. If your system is already installed, it doesn't change the behavior, but new systems will behave differently.
All of these changes are again communicated via "NEWS" mechanism. If Debian changes a config file, it's replaced. If you modified this file, apt will ask what you prefer, and you can diff the file in place.
In the past, many similar changes are made, and all were transparent. If you're not using any external repositories which change tons of system packages with their own versions, nothing changes during upgrades for you.
While there's an extensive release note provided with every release like [0], the upgrades are pretty straightforward.
As a result, having a few or many Debian systems which are older than a decade is a norm, not an exception.
[0]: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/release-notes/
Then make it longer. The debian team is starved for volunteers and would love to have more long term maintainers.
I mean, if they are using CentOS, apparently not.
1. free/gratis Linux distribution
2. long support (~ 10 years)
3. not needing to contribute (as a community)
It seems that we can only pick two from this list (even a distribution with short support cycle needs community).
Containers have been a big help.
Upgrading the OS is easy. Initial work is a couple of days, rest of the deployment is an hour or so, but the software we need to run doesn't support CentOS 7+. Containerization might help or not, but most software is distributed as RPM packages and some of them are written with things like Python2.7.
Current job doesn't give me many chances to use linux rn so I'm a bit out of touch. Recently took a look at rocky and it felt like a centos. also tried ubuntu but I recall I had to remove some ads package yeah.
My first question was "what's the replacement for aptitude", and people pointed me to "yum shell". It was not as good, but I got used to it, and went with it.
If you run "aptitude" on debian, without any argument, you end up in a TUI, you can use it to install or remove packages from your system, and then see the "preview" of the change, and apply/cancel the change. The same way people use "yum shell".
I'm used to new "dnf shell", so I don't miss aptitude anymore, but I think aptitude is what you're looking for.
I don't have anything against apt, it's just specific edge cases when it really saved me massive headaches by being able to remove and add during same change without having to remove all apps depending on it.
i know its a whole environment change but debian really is the logical replacement for a centos style deployment.
I would love to be able to comment on rocky linux but i havent used that quite yet.
And the logs. I think it's every 30 minutes or so that "buy Ubuntu advantage" gets logged, you have to disable a systemd timer to get rid of it.
If they don't change their mind, i would not build my business on a promise made by IBM ;)
I think commitment to your baby (your project) is far more morally superior than commitment to just making your stakeholders happy...no?
BTW: I buy Github DVDs, I don't load it from the "Internet".
What is your point, anyway?
That all of Debian will have a baby? Or that all of ArchLinux gets impregnated at once? Big projects are usually not led by a single person....oh whait...linux is, and now Linus cannot have sex anymore, thank you OP.
Aside from that, Rocky Linux also seems like a great choice for many: https://rockylinux.org/
Some also say that AlmaLinux is pretty good: https://almalinux.org/
Personally, I found RPM distros to be quite stable but have largely moved over to Ubuntu LTS for servers (technically Debian also has a LTS release, but it’s not as mainstream) and Linux Mint locally (largely Ubuntu without focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is pleasant), it’s been working pretty well so far.
Then again, I run most software in Docker containers, so thankfully underlying OS changes usually aren’t too bad for me to deal with.
Alma independently manage their updates though, started by Cloudlinux, who are also experts in maintaining EL distros
Jup for enterprise, OracleLinux it is. I don't like Oracle as any normal person would, but they never did some shady stuff with their Linux, it even works perfectly on a Raspberry PI.
For people who don't want CentOS Stream, i.e. basically the nightly RHEL builds, the lack of having a versioned CentOS mirroring RHEL versions coming out of Red Hat (for about the last 10 years) puts them in somewhat uncharted waters even if they could pick one of the RHEL alternatives and "probably" be fine.