Question So, what's the preferred replacement for CentOS?

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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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Jul 1, 2001
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I noticed that Red Hat is no longer going to be supporting CentOS as a free alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and will now be using CentOS as a test branch for new RHEL releases as "CentOS Stream" instead:

www.cyberciti.biz

CentOS Linux 8 will end in 2021 and shifts focus to CentOS Stream - nixCraft

CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end in 2021. CentOS Stream continues, serving as the upstream (development) branch of RHEL 8.
www.cyberciti.biz www.cyberciti.biz

Of course, most people use CentOS as a free unsupported version of RHEL in their development and test environments. This change basically means that it can longer be used for that purpose, as it's now going to be ahead of Red Hat releases instead of being in-sync with them.

So, what do you think you're going to use as a replacement for CentOS?

Scientific Linux used to be a free compatible alternative to RHEL, but they never did a version 8 of it.

Amazon offers their own free RHEL clone called Amazon Linux, but it's not 100% compatible and is really optimized for AWS (naturally).

Oracle does a free RHEL clone called Oracle Linux, but... it's from Oracle. Eww.

I guess that I could just switch to Ubuntu, but that would pretty much require rewriting all of my installation scripts to use apt-get instead of yum. Ubuntu also keeps a lot of its configuration files in different locations, which would also make switching a pain.
 
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lxskllr

lxskllr

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Nov 30, 2004
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If it was me, I'd switch to debian. Solid, stable, and unconnected to a company. Not helpful in your case due to the somewhat drastic change. Might be worth playing with though to see how it goes. Might not be as bad as you think. How close is opensuse to redhat? I think they used to be fairly similar, but I might be misremembering, especially after ~15 years...
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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Commercial software support for Debian is kinda lacking. They usually only support Ubuntu or Red Hat and it's clones.

We're a Java/Tomcat/Apache/MariaDB shop mostly, but we still have the occasional piece of "Enterprise" crap that we need to support.
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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One of the nice things about Red Hat Linux is that 99% of it is open source. The only pieces that are copyrighted are the logos and brand name. Someone else could just download the source code and compile their own version if they wanted to. I think that I'd call it Ultimatebob's Cheesehat Linux :)
 
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mv2devnull

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Apr 13, 2010
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Springdale (aka PUIAS) Linux is a "RHEL clone" too? They have had some (scientific) packages that EPEL/CentOS lacks/is slow to build.

109 of top 500 supercomputers tell that they use CentOS.
Are they "development and test environments" or "production"?

ultimatebob said:
One of the nice things about Red Hat Linux is that 99% of it is open source. The only pieces that are copyrighted are the logos and brand name. Someone else could just download the source code and compile their own version if they wanted to. I think that I'd call it Ultimatebob's Cheesehat Linux :)
Click to expand...
The builds of CentOS have taken a while, because Red Hat does not share their build environment. There are dependencies between packages. One can't simply
for P in *.src.rpm ; do rpmbuild --rebuild $P ; done
 
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mv2devnull

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After years of only RH-based ecosystems, the shift to Debian seems laborous.

What are the chances that Greg gets "Rocky Linux" running smoothly:
Gregory Kurtzer said:
December 8, 2020 at 4:27 pm
I am considering creating another rebuild of RHEL and may even be able to hire some people for this effort. If you are interested in helping, please join the HPCng slack (link on the website hpcng.org).

Greg
(original founder of CentOS)
Click to expand...
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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ViviTheMage said:
In the current climate? CentOS stream is probably OK. Fedora as a close second, but it's a little bleeding edge for some things.
Click to expand...

It wouldn't work for me. I need my dev and test environments to be basically identical to my production environment. If production is running RHEL 8, CentOS Stream isn't going to cut it because it would be way ahead on package releases.
 
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ViviTheMage

ViviTheMage

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Dec 12, 2002
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ultimatebob said:
It wouldn't work for me. I need my dev and test environments to be basically identical to my production environment. If production is running RHEL 8, CentOS Stream isn't going to cut it because it would be way ahead on package releases.
Click to expand...

Yeah, you only have one choice then, go with RHEL 8. I can't think of any that mimic it that way, except CentOS. They're really putting us all in a weird situation.
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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ViviTheMage said:
Yeah, you only have one choice then, go with RHEL 8. I can't think of any that mimic it that way, except CentOS. They're really putting us all in a weird situation.
Click to expand...

The place I work now could afford that cost, but they already decided to go with Amazon Linux because we're migrating to AWS. The last place I worked could barely afford to pay it's employees, though. Paying up for RHEL licenses would probably bankrupt them.
 
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Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

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I'm still on CentOS 6.5 on most of my servers so very due for upgrade, kind of been debating for a while what direction to go and kind of eyeing Debian at this point. Though it's nice to hear that CentOS already got forked. That didn't take long lol.

Hopefully they don't run into any legal issues though, like IBM trying to claim that they own certain patents that are used in RH or whatever.
 
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postmortemIA

postmortemIA

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Jul 11, 2006
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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with original 4.15 kernel is going to be supported for another 2 and half years, and not much risk of things getting broken as kernel is getting only security fixes at this point. That's what Ubuntu Server is based on.
 
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mv2devnull

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Migrating within same distro family (e.g. CentOS -> Springdale Linux) can be almost as simple as update of the repo definitions.

Migration to another family (RH -> Debian) requires reinstall and adoption of totally different conventions (configuration, admin tools, etc). Not to mention user applications that are not trivially installed via package manager. (Sources and binary blobs tend to be a necessary evil.)

If you already have configurations for both families and "install is cheap", then ... lucky you.


@Red Squirrel: There is no good excuse to have CentOS 6.5. "Apply all available updates" was the only supported CentOS policy.
To not have migrated CentOS 6.10 quite yet (although the end at 2020-11-30 was known well ahead) is somewhat understandable.
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

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Jul 1, 2001
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mv2devnull said:
Migrating within same distro family (e.g. CentOS -> Springdale Linux) can be almost as simple as update of the repo definitions.

Migration to another family (RH -> Debian) requires reinstall and adoption of totally different conventions (configuration, admin tools, etc). Not to mention user applications that are not trivially installed via package manager. (Sources and binary blobs tend to be a necessary evil.)

If you already have configurations for both families and "install is cheap", then ... lucky you.


@Red Squirrel: There is no good excuse to have CentOS 6.5. "Apply all available updates" was the only supported CentOS policy.
To not have migrated CentOS 6.10 quite yet (although the end at 2020-11-30 was known well ahead) is somewhat understandable.
Click to expand...

This is true... switching from CentOS 7 to Scientific Linux 7 (for example) can be done by simply changing the yum repos configuration file and running an update. I've done it before.

Switching from CentOS 6 to 7 was a tough jump if you had a lot of fancy init.d scripts, because it forced the migration to systemd (boo!). That said, you probably should have started that process six months ago, Red :)
 
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Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

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May 24, 2003
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mv2devnull said:
@Red Squirrel: There is no good excuse to have CentOS 6.5. "Apply all available updates" was the only supported CentOS policy.
To not have migrated CentOS 6.10 quite yet (although the end at 2020-11-30 was known well ahead) is somewhat understandable.
Click to expand...

The "excuse" is that migrating stuff to a new OS is a pain in the ass because of having to rebuild/reconfigure everything as config file format tends to change between distros so not like you can just drop configs from the old one. (Ex: apache and such), so I just got lazy. 6.5 just happens to be what was the latest version at the time I setup most of my servers so that's what I have. Migrating from 6.5 to 6.10 would be a ridiculous waste of time, may as well wait for a more major version. I just happened to wait a little longer than I should... lol.

I wanted to upgrade to 7 but so much stuff was different because of SystemD so just got lazy to take the time to figure it out, then 8 came out so figured I should just upgrade to that, but with the whole IBM stuff I was kind of weary and debating on going Debian anyway so still on the fence about what direction I go. I also want to avoid so much repetition when setting up each box and want to setup my own custom ISO that has all the basic config/packages I want so I can automate a bunch of the repetitious initial setup stuff. That will take some time to learn how to do that and prepare it, but once I have it going it will be faster to upgrade everything.
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

Lifer
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Updating CentOS 6.5 to 6.10 is as easy as doing a yum update -y and rebooting when it's done updating. That's worthwhile just for the security updates. I've done that many times without losing any Apache configuration along the way.
 
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ultimatebob

ultimatebob

Lifer
Jul 1, 2001
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Red Squirrel said:
I do yum update regularly, it's never brought me that far.

Edit: NM, apparantly I am on 6.10. I don't know when that happened. Normally to go up a version you need to redownload the ISO and install that version.
Click to expand...

Not with 6 or 7, anyway. It will automatically update you to the latest point release if you let it update everything.
 
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