In shocking news the CentOS project announced today that are shifting their Linux distribution to be based on the beta (non-stable) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, rather than the stable branch. And that they are terminating CentOS 8 updates at the 31st of December, 2021. The CentOS project will now release something named “CentOS […]
  • @ksynwa
    7•3 years ago

    Why is this bad? Pardon my ignorance.

    • @AgreeableLandscapeOPM
      12•3 years ago

      CentOS was the non-subscription version of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and was massively popular as a server operating system. Now that CentOS is killing its stable version, no sane person would keep using it on their servers, so they’ve thrown away most of their market share, likely in a bid to get people to use RHEL.

      • @ksynwa
        4•3 years ago

        My understand is that the non stable branch can’t be too bad but if people want surity of stability I guess they’ll migrate to Debian or something.

        • @AgreeableLandscapeOPM
          12•3 years ago

          For production servers you should basically never use non-stable operating systems.

          • Halce
            1•3 years ago

            Doesn’t the change just mean it’s going to be a rolling release? As long as they push quality updates, I can’t see why it would be unstable. In fact, wouldn’t security vulnerabilities get patched sooner?

            • @AgreeableLandscapeOPM
              3•3 years ago

              I don’t know about how CentOS handled security patches for its stable releases, but Debian does backports of security updates (AFAIK there can be issues but it works fine for the important packages). The main problem is that rolling release can package conflicts and subtle issues, and depending on what branch the actual packages are on, they can be unstable or have many bugs (Nvidia drivers were the bame of my existance both when I ran Arch/Manjaro and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed). I’m not a sysadmin, but everywhere I read not to use rolling release for a production server.

        • @Tabzlock
          3•3 years ago

          Fedora is alive and well. It suits better as a workstation or testing server operating system, using it on production isn’t a good idea.

          Rhel unlike fedora is very stable and I believe it has support for over 8yrs which is a lot. Rhel unstable however doesn’t have a support time and can be unpredictable. It isn’t as unstable as fedora but is compared to Rhel Stable.

          So the fact that cent os which was previously based on Rhel stable is a huge issue. Because lots of production servers rely on it and don’t want to purchase the incredibly expensive Rhel stable license.