The most frustrating part of Linux for me is all the damn mental CPU cycle I have to spend keeping up with the naming and positioning of the various distros. Often it borders on drama.<p>The other day I commented that I took my Pinebook Pro off the toy shelf and loaded up Manjaro. I commented on HN about how much I liked the user experience. The first reply I got was something about the drama with some dude named Phil. Alternatively I’ll put my head down for a while and forget about the lineage of the various options and then something will crop up about this or that distro is going away, being repositioned or whatnot.<p>Why does this matter? Because I want to use it for real work and I don’t want to spend time planning a long term OS strategy. There are other things to worry about. I’m far from alone in this. That’s why folks reach for Mac OS and Windows.<p>Downvote away, but I really do want to love Linux. I just don’t want it to be so hard to love.
<i>Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but I'm here entirely with my own opinion</i><p>My God, it's been a long time (if ever) since I've seen so much misinformation out there. I mostly blame Red Hat for the very poor delivery, but tech people are not immune to the tendency for dramatizing, misrepresenting, and polarizing. Please stop spreading this. CentOS is <i>NOT</i> dead. CentOS is changing, but not all that much (yes, really).<p>I'll do my best to answer questions here, but I'm also going to rush a blog post to try and get it out ASAP that corrects a lot of this.<p>Edit: Here's the blog post. Excuse typos and other things, I rushed this ;-)<p><a href="https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop-saying-it-is-at-least-until-you-read-this-4b26b5c44877?sk=e500c2f16403d634ff8a4ea17d705252" rel="nofollow">https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...</a>
Sure enough, the community started <a href="https://rockylinux.org/" rel="nofollow">https://rockylinux.org/</a> as quick as redhat killed it!
Many years ago, I fondly used and documented the free and open Red Hat distribution, which ended with release 9 in 2003. I still have a hard drive with the original Red Hat 6 based on System V init, not the later v6 based on Upstart.<p>There was a great feeling of abandonment then that is nostalgic in the death of CentOS now.<p>In the years that have passed, I saw a few licenses purchased in my workplace, then support suddenly stopped by corporate sources who instructed all license holders to convert our installs to Oracle Linux support.<p>I remembered my feeling of abandonment by Red Hat, ran the script without complaint, and all was well.<p>In later years, focus returned to Red Hat licensing, and I was strongly encouraged to reinstall my Oracle Linux systems (which had grown greatly, as they were free). I resisted vehemently, objecting to an inferior kernel (compared to the UEK), reduced hardware support, and the pointless inconvenience of license keys, activation, and renewals for a product of generally lower quality.<p>Fortunately, I have avoided this inconvenience.<p>In light of the decades of Red Hat's behavior, I will say one thing: you reap what you sow.
Article kind of hints at it but I suspect RHEL is going to get a new licensing model to capture the CentOS crowd under the RHEL umbrella. Once that's done it will be easier to upsell support contracts since they'll have the users in their license DB.
The IBM bean counters have spoken and Red Hat is to be squeezed of every last drop of revenue. I bet they are demanding Red Hat employees apply for patents for everything they are working on too.
CentOS has had a stability advantage by being downstream of RHEL. It makes sense to switch the free version to be upstream of the paid version.<p>Unexpectedly changing CentOS 8 after many had already migrated to it makes no sense and thoroughly damages Red Hat’s reputation in my view.<p>Perhaps Red Hat will consider continuing CentOS 8 under the same terms they had promised, while <i>also</i> releasing CentOS Stream. Many would value earlier updates over additional stability and make the switch willingly. The rest would avoid having the rug yanked out from under them without warning. Obviously, this dual path would require more effort, but it would engender more trust in Red Hat going forward even if we knew there would be no CentOS 9. It would also keep many from migrating elsewhere.
I don't think it's fair to attribute this to IBM.<p>An outcome like this was expected as far back as 2014 -- it just took longer than most of us expected.<p>As I've said before, CentOS hasn't been a "community" enterprise operating system for a long, long time now.
Since Centos Stream is upstream of RHEL, is it possible for an organization downstream to just manage a set of repositories (or whitelists) so that it only releases the Centos Stream versions that reached RHEL?
Now that you can run Amazon Linux 2 in a VM on your own machine, we're simply switching to that. It's nearly the same system.<p><a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-linux-2-virtual-machine.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/amazon-l...</a><p>(And there's pre-built boxes for Vagrant, etc. Search the Vagrant boxes to see it.)
So, what I don’t understand is that I thought the whole point of CentOS was that RedHat didn’t control it? I guess I missed the acquisition announcement, but a RedHat-owned CentOS makes a lot less sense to me.
Goddammit! I was planning a whole CentOS-based encrypted web service. SHIT!<p>At least we haven't bought any hardware yet... back to the drawing board.
That was to be expected for a long time. Embrace (financing most of Linux development, with SuSE historically a close 2nd), Extend (introduce Linuxisms such as systemd, containers), Extinguish (make putting together all the F/OSS amounting to a complete O/S an art, make changes for the sake of it, sell "support").<p>What's not answered is why <i>now</i>, in the middle of an active CentOS release cycle? Smells like IBM/RH doesn't see growth in new enterprise customers/startups coming to Linux (going to clouds/k8s instead and focusing on creating Docker images for workloads). RedHat surely must've been fully aware that discontinuing CentOS would create a giant backlash. I guess, like me, few people haven't used CentOS as base for new builds anyway; OTOH corporate clouds (OpenShift, k8s) for big customers seems like an attractive market for IBM/RH.<p>Edit: a good outcome of this catastrophe might be to shift focus towards POSIX, LSB, and other means for portability which historically had strong following in the Linux and BSD communities