CentOS 8 to be discontinued at end of 2021

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RTM

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Jan 26, 2014
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Apparently Red Hat have decided that they had enough of people using RHEL for free via CentOS by deciding to stop supporting CentOS 8 at the end of 2021 in favor of CentOS Stream 8.

CentOS Stream is apparently intended to function as an upstream project for RHEL, so it is not a 1:1 replacement.
In my humble opinion, stream is not an enterprise linux distribution, so this looks bad for people using CentOS.

I suppose we should have figured out something like this would happen eventually, given that scientific linux decided to not do a RHEL 8 clone, RH got acquired by IBM and RH took over the CentOS project (happened a while ago).

The only "free" EL-based alternative is Oracle Enterprise Linux, but honestly who wants more Oracle in their life?
 

Ponury Typ

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Oct 28, 2015
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So its either be our alpha tester on distro without full futures or pay us money. F**k IBM. I would rather switch to debian than use this.
 
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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I'm moving more and more towards ubuntu lts for workstations and servers...
 

MBastian

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Jul 17, 2016
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Considering the abysmal update frequency which already drove people(also me) away I am not that suprised. Stupid move from IBM.
I am guessing Fermilab will not be pleased and they might resurrect Scientific Linux or switch to Oracle Linux, which is also a RHEL clone.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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I saw this today and while not super surprised was very disappointed. Not sure where to from here, don’t really like Ubuntu but I guess plain Debian is an option.
Oracle Linux not really a great idea.

Sad to see. Oh well see what happens next year.
 

Blinky 42

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Aug 6, 2015
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I do hope someone picks up the RPM based distro mantle with a stable and somewhat recent update cycle quickly. Scientific Linux was great, not seeing any official responses yet on the mailing lists but lots of "WTF!?!?!" type comments after folks sunk time into making things work with C8's somewhat wacky setup.
 

T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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It's going to be interesting to see what happens with CloudLinux and cPanel\WHM now.

We only use CloudLinux\CentOS for cPanel these days, the rest have migrated to Ubuntu.
 

sboesch

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Aug 3, 2012
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This sucks. I just converted a bunch of RHEL servers to CentOS to get away from RHEL costs but to maintain needed binary compatibility.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Years ago I was told that I made a poor choice for using the "niche" Ubuntu Linux as our standard. I am feeling a bit better about that.

I think we are going to do a bit on this over the weekend. I am doing a lot to see how far I can push the video process to see if I can get more than 8 videos up this month which is sucking a lot of time.

I do appreciate hearing the thoughts on this. It is good to know I am not the only one who did not see this as a benefit to the community.
 
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RTM

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Jan 26, 2014
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Gregory is spinning things up here Rocky Linux so far
That is good news, I suppose the question is what kind of distribution can they make, will we see it become what CentOS used to be?

I suspect that CentOS having been run by RedHat for the last half decade had an impact on timeliness of security updates (the assumption being that CentOS got security updates as quickly as RHEL). Being a separate project you might expect them to be unable to start the security patching process before a patch is released for RHEL.

Of course that is all just speculation, I suppose it is possible that security updates are already being delayed.
 

sean

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Sep 26, 2013
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I'm biased since we use this at work, but SLE and openSUSE Leap are moving to a RHEL/CentOS relationship. Leap right now is built on SLE and the next release will share the exact same packages between the two where possible, not even a rebuild needed.

The downside is SLE upgrades some packages, such as the kernel, in subsequent service pack releases. I personally prefer this because it's easier to know I get everything in the kernel as of that version and don't have to research which particular release had a newer feature backported.
 

MBastian

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Jul 17, 2016
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The downside is SLE upgrades some packages, such as the kernel, in subsequent service pack releases. I personally prefer this because it's easier to know I get everything in the kernel as of that version and don't have to research which particular release had a newer feature backported.
This. I've had to deal with SLES 11 a few years back and it wasn't nice. They suddenly updated MySQL from 5.0 to 5.5 (not 100% sure about the versions) in a minor release and we had to deal with the fallout. Also the RPM package quality was abysmal and obvious bugs wheren't fixed. The standard support answer: Just upgrade SLES 12 when it is available.

For CentOS. I really was interested to give CentOS Stream a try when I upgrade my NAS but now IBM can shove it where the sun doesn't shine!
 
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llowrey

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Feb 26, 2018
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I've been in the Red Hat camp since around Fedora Core 3. The IBM years have not been kind and this is now going to push me toward something else.

Fedora has been too 'cowboy' for me. The upside is that it has caused me to perfect my backup strategy and to test my backups often, but the net has been to the downside and usually caused by kernel bugs. CentOS has been too stale but the stability has been excellent.

If I were to switch teams to Debian, would stable be equivalent to RHEL/CentOS and testing equivalent to Fedora? It seems like stable, with its ~2 year cycle, is going to be a bit less stale than CentOS, but is testing going to be more or less 'cowboy' than Fedora?

Ubuntu does not seem particularly compelling since I'm just looking for the basics.
 

Vesalius

Active Member
Nov 25, 2019
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I've been in the Red Hat camp since around Fedora Core 3. The IBM years have not been kind and this is now going to push me toward something else.

Fedora has been too 'cowboy' for me. The upside is that it has caused me to perfect my backup strategy and to test my backups often, but the net has been to the downside and usually caused by kernel bugs. CentOS has been too stale but the stability has been excellent.

If I were to switch teams to Debian, would stable be equivalent to RHEL/CentOS and testing equivalent to Fedora? It seems like stable, with its ~2 year cycle, is going to be a bit less stale than CentOS, but is testing going to be more or less 'cowboy' than Fedora?

Ubuntu does not seem particularly compelling since I'm just looking for the basics.
Fedora likely somewhere between unstable and testing. So testing less cowboy than stable and LTS closer to Centos.

 

gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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I know this is very controversial, but why not using blank Gentoo for a server environment? There is Gentoo ‘stable’. If you are scared to compile everything, just set up one machine as build server for all. Then update your machines from the build server. Cross-compile for other platforms.

I never had slicker server environment. Own kernel, own usage of flags to keep dependencies down, which can lead to less vulnerabilities. You just tighten your server down. if you dont want eg MySQL 5.5 just mask it.

No kernel bloat like in all the other distros. strip your kernel down.

Its fun.

Add: Check out Funtoo too
 
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MBastian

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Jul 17, 2016
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I know this is very controversial, but why to using blank Gentoo for a server environment?

Living on the bleeding edge is fun, most of the time. But at work I like my Linux distros boring and predictable. ^_^
Even a stable Gentoo environment has to be updated at some point in time. Q: How would one handle security and bugfix update here? Would you have to write your own backports?
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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I know this is very controversial, but why to using blank Gentoo for a server environment? There is Gentoo ‘stable’. If you are scared to compile everything, just set up one machine as build server for all. Then update your machines from the build server. Cross-compile for other platforms.

I never had slicker server environment. Own kernel, own usage of flags to keep dependencies down, which can lead to less vulnerabilities. You just tighten your server down. if you dont want eg MySQL 5.5 just mask it.

No kernel bloat like in all the other distros. strip your kernel down.

Its fun.

Add: Check out Funtoo too
Community ENTERPRISE operating system
It's not always about fun ._.

Some software requires a "certified" or "verified" operating system like RHEL or Centos, for example the Autodesk tools:
Maya.JPG
 
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