The Conclusio: CentOS Is Dead

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Why?

it is called “rolling release” and no one gave officially a statement to the question I asked,

if it is meant like that of Win10 …

a beta release is not the same that many expect as a stable system, as they are used to have with CentOS;

you should think of renaming CentOS to something different, because with Enterprise this CentOS Stream has nothing in common;

and does Redhat really expect everone – even private people – afford a RHEL subscription¹ just to have a stable system?

¹ I would in case I only need just one RHEL subscription for ALL my private used VMs (including the ones hosted in internet as VPS)

– a DNS server
– a proxy server (squid)
– a mail server (mail store – cyrus-imapd)
– a mail server (mail router f. outgoing mails)
– a mail server (mail scanner f. incoming mails with SpamAssassin and ClamAV)
– a 2nd proxy server (squid, with SSL interception and Squidclamav plus ClamAV)
– a web server (apache)
– a jump host
– a 6in4 router
– desktop with graphical UI (plus Firefox and Thunderbird) is a now a SL, but they decided several time ago,
  not to do their own system based on RHEL, they use CentOS, that is now a little bit bad for this/SL’s use case;

– a VPS with OpenVPN (used with my smartphone)
– a VPS with a proxy (squid, to avoid censorship due to geolocation blocking)
– a VPS as the other end of 6in4
– a VPS with storage of my own files
  (all VPS run a bind, too)

Thanks for read;

Walter

15 thoughts on - The Conclusio: CentOS Is Dead

  • Dear, I think we are all in the same position and situation and I do not think it is time to cry over spilled milk, now and without putting hands in favor of RedHat, to which I no longer believe anything, we have to move on and support the Community initiatives that are appearing and that I believe will come with the same strength and spirit of our deceased CentOS. Cheers,

    —
    Victor

  • It should not have been called a rolling release. It is not a rolling release in the sense that many Linux distributions use it.

    I don’t know what that means. No. It will not be like Win 10 in pretty much every way.

    It is not a beta release.

    Maybe. But I think it has more in common than you think

    No. In many cases, CentOS Stream will provide a stable system for the needs of individuals. In many other cases, upcoming low- and no-cost RHEL programs will address many of these needs. As an individual, you can already get RHEL
    with no cost through the Developer Program, although it isn’t as easy as it could be and usage is limited. The upcoming plans are intended to address those problems. It’s unfortunate that the timing is such that those aren’t anything but future promises at this point, but they are coming. See https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/faq-CentOS-stream-updates#Q10 and email CentOS-questions@redhat.com with your specific needs. That address goes to real people who are working on these programs, not sales or anything like that.

  • if it is currently changed over the night… How can you be sure that the CentOS8 stream will not be dropped tomorrow?
    How about CentOS9, CentOS10, CentOS Core?!
    How can you be sure that what was “promised” will not be canceled in one second?
    I think most of the derivatives will be dead with one or two releases, like was with Debian, such as Devuan, never got a new version…

    In general, I would blame “DevOps” mindset! That might have played the bad thing here and forced all to this decision.

    Maybe RH wanted something like Debian GNU/Linux Testing/stable concept (in some cases TESTING more stable than prod, as it had the possibility to have a newer major version with rewritten codebase)?

    In either way, RH showed, that after IBM have got them, IBM KPI’s forced RH
    to do some moves which we never ever were expecting to happen before IBM RH. Maybe even a first thing that could be a sign, changing Logo into a
    “simple” one…

    What is left now to treat as trust worthful OS? My decision would be to bet on:
    * Debian (biggest arch and package selection, which is quite up to date, and can easily upgrade from 2 to 10, yeah, of course, you will need to do some mambo jumbo), You can find some things like parrotOS, previous backtrack and much more in there, so just ADD repo, and download package what you miss in debian repos. And a shame thing, bubuntu is based on deb, so, same here, just add missing repos from bubuntu for particular package
    (but I have never ever seen such case, when bubuntu had smth needful, what debian didn’t.
    * OpenBSD (very very very clear way forward, very openminded OS, but at the same time SEC on a first place!), already has vmd, written with a clean codebase, looks very promissing replacement for kvm in general usages.
    * FreeBSD, AnyOtherBSD BSD, you know… LOTS of appliances work on it! Has ZFS support… behyve…
    * Arch or Gentoo? Why not LFS then? But both have quite good support and showed themselfs.

    your suggestions?

    —
    Ruslanas Gžibovskis
    +370 6030 7030

  • I am CentOS guy last 20 years but not anymore. I have started looking into Ubuntu. Sent from my iPhone

  • Different:
    Debian, OpenSuse, Ubuntu-server. All good choices.

    Not quite so different:
    Rocky, (Maybe one of the corporate sponsored CentOS-a-likes, (OEL, Cloudlinux etc) but we’ve now learned it would be nicer to rely on a distro that wasn’t provided at the whim of someone who might need to cut costs at any time)

  • My course of action is to wait for Lenix (Ref.:
    https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-community-driven-rhel-fork-by-cloudlinux)
    and Rocky Linux (https://rockylinux.org/) by CentOS original founder.

    IMHO, both will end to what we really want/need, because they care.

    As I have already mentioned, I would encourage projects to join forces to produce a single platform.

    I won’t go to Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD. You may call it a personal preference. I feel much more comfortable with EL.

    I would try to avoid OL (as it is governed by a large corp which can drop it easily).

    Cheers, Nick

  • It is not that we haven’t been here before, this is just history repeating itself.

    IBM, SCO, Sun, Novell, etc. majorly have screwed up because of some geniuses having a great business idea.

    (that’s how BSD disappeared, Solaris was a disaster, Xenix never made it..  and whatever happened to SCO etc?)

    But here is the point, RHEL for example is used at scale a lot now, because there are people that know how to deal with it (far and few beyond) ….   and the ones I know use CentOS for their own stuff (at home) because it is so similar. It is already a problem to find qualified people that can use/deal with RHEL in a production environment at scale (if you know what you’re doing, you easily can get a cosy 6
    figure job, because it’s next to impossible to find a decent sys person with experience, for sure not for at scale operations) , and those are not going to pay hundreds/thousands for a RHEL license at home, that is why they use CentOS, while at work working with RHEL.

    I am in that situation, I request 5-6 figures worth of RHEL licenses on a regular basis, and use several CentOS machines at homes (yeah I am that guy that doesn’t have a life and my ‘hobby’ is kinda like my work.)
    It will be a very freaking cold day in hell before I start paying thousands to have virtually ‘the same thing’ at home as at work.

    If a few months down the road, if I decide to use Linus XYZ, or whatever, than that is what we’ll be using where I get my pay check from
    …  and if not, well, good luck finding someone that can keep things running there. Because that is what it comes down to.  It is not the product that determines what the “industry standard” is..   it is the ones that have experience and can actually make stuff work.

    I think CentOS is dead because RHEL just committed suicide.

    Ron

  • Le 15/12/2020 à 08:17, Nikolaos Milas a écrit :

    Right now Rocky Linux is not much more than a README file on Github.

    On the other hand, Oracle Linux has been a well-tended free-as-in-beer RHEL
    clone with some nifty extra features for the last 14 years.

    Wozu in die Ferne schweifen, wenn das Gute liegt so nah? (Goethe)

    :o)

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  • Oracle Linux, only after Oracle Solaris will shine again with their awesome SPARC arch… Which has an amazing features…

    Nice, I did not check Devuan for a long time, if they still alive… hmm, I have hope in Rocky then, but would be more fun if guys do not just scrap everything fast into distro, and then, ooook, how do we work with it now… I believe Rocky will be a good thing, but hope other projects will merge into it instead of building their own. Even if everyone of us want to build our own :D

    But still, after this move, I do not have the same trust in RH as it was previously.

    Do you, People, still have a stone-proof trust in RH after last week’s news?

    —
    Ruslanas Gžibovskis
    +370 6030 7030

  • Solaris tried to take over the “Sunos/bsd status quo”, that was a disaster, it was a good idea but licensing killed it.

    I think that ‘Rocky idea’ has some potential.

    CentOS and RH are dead, well in a hopeless coma for now.  It’s IBM, 
    Torvalds’ Linux almost killed off IBM, Oracle, Novell and did a lot of
    ‘damage’ to MS in that market, IBM is still a dinosaur with the same
    70’s brain capacity, it won’t be able to pull it off even if they had a monopoly on OS’ in general.

  • Il 14/12/20 23:47, Ruslanas Gžibovskis ha scritto:

    It is the debian family time man. I’m converting many stuff to debian buster and some on Ubuntu LTS 20.04.

    Would be great if FreeBSD will be largely adopted now.

  • FreeBSD becomes more and more my favorite now:

    – it feels closer to EL6 and more home to me than any newer Linux (except Devuan and the like).
    – doesn’t have systemd and all the other new stuff :-)
    – is stable and has a friendly community
    – has ZFS
    – is very _well_ documented!

    Ok, I came from a UNIX background before Linux was born so I got much used to the UNIX way.

    Have been toying with FreeBSD and other BSDs for years but it’s more likely than ever that I’ll make the switch now.

    Regards, Simon