[bayindirh]

Hey: Please read the answer to this comment first. It contains some very important clarifications. Leaving the comment up for completeness, context and admittance of error. Happy reading.

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Disclaimer: We use CentOS on almost all of our servers at production level for 10+ years.

The main problem with CentOS is not moving into a rolling release schedule, but change of its place in the ecosystem.

Before, CentOS was the last tier. Fedora was testing ideas, RedHat was implementing them, and CentOS was following the trail by porting them later. There was an unwritten agreement that RedHat didn't prevent CentOS' development, and CentOS didn't port everything at day 1, so they were in a mutualistic state. Moreover, CentOS enjoyed a ~10 year support on every release, so it was the soul-successor of the original RedHat from the olden times.

Now, CentOS moved to pre-RH position. So Fedora experiments, CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support.

This is problematic for many places since CentOS was the RPM Equivalent of Debian Stable. Now, there's no RedHat based free and community-driven and community-supported distro. People who can't use CentOS in its future state will either migrate to RedHat or to Ubuntu or Debian Stable.

For us, and for other data centers which do the same thing as us, current situation is a very big let's wait and see game.

For the health of the ecosystem, we need another fully free (as in beer & as in speech) and fully supported distribution. Hope Rocky can fill that void.

I'll continue to use Debian on my personal systems, for foreseeable future.

[dralley]

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat

>CentOS makes the Beta & RC testing and RedHat gets more thoroughly tested patches and, that's it. CentOS is moving to a Debian Testing meets Arch Linux position. It's neither stable as Debian Testing, Nor supported like Arch and lacks any official support and possibly no security patch support.

This isn't correct.

Debian Testing is a true rolling release distribution for the next "major" version of Debian. If you install Debian testing, what you're getting is a hybrid between Debian N and Debian N+1, with package versions that at any point in time may or may not be similar to those in _either_ Debian N or Debian N+1, since they get continually updated up until the stabilization phase.

That is not what CentOS Stream is.

CentOS Stream is a rolling release for the next minor (_not_ major) release of RHEL, and follows the same development process, including the exact same CI and testing scrutiny that was required to update a package in RHEL internally. It's basically taking the development process which used to be internal, and opening it up to everyone else.

Unlike Debian Testing, CentOS Stream is _not_ a hybrid between major releases of RHEL (say, RHEL 8 and RHEL 9). It's frozen to a major release. So CentOS Stream 8 will track the development of RHEL 8.3, 8.4, 8.5 and so on, and CentOS Stream 9 will track the development of RHEL 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and so on. And like both RHEL and current CentOS, that means that the updates will only fall into the categories of backported bugfixes, security fixes, support for new hardware, and on very rare occasions individual backported features.

This is more significantly stable than Debian Testing - it is less "Debian Testing meets Arch" but rather "old CentOS meets Debian Testing".

Where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That is not true...

[bayindirh]

Daniel, thanks for the comment and clarifications in (Googled your twitter account for your first name, hope that's OK).

Actually, the initial communication of this issue was so vague from our perspective, so this is what I and my colleagues understood.

Again, thanks for clarifying, because I personally don't want to bash CentOS, but want to understand what's happening and continue to use it. Maybe it would be beneficial to disseminate this in a more visible and more understandable way.

> And further - where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That false...

I didn't hear, but as I said, CentOS Stream was presented as a proving-grounds distribution and, I understood that it'll receive security updates in a best-effort basis.

The news came in a crashing way and the initial roadmap didn't communicated well to the outside world in the beginning. To be frank, a lot of people felt betrayed by IBM/RH. When a company announces a big paradigm shift and cuts the support for the latest release at the end of the year without further explanation besides marketing speak, thinking otherwise is pretty hard.

Hope you understand the frustration.

Cheers

[google234123]

You don't actually have to use someone's personal info just because you have it BTW. Just saying thanks is enough.

[bayindirh]

I just wanted to be kind, sincere, and asked his permission explicitly in my comment I presume. At least it was my intention.

If he wanted me to remove it, I would have happily done so.

Also, I just pasted his nick to Google and it came on top. So I presume he didn’t try to hide his name. If I have sensed the contrary, I would not dig one step further.

[panarky]

"Asking for permission", while simultaneously doing the thing you're asking permission for, without waiting for a response, is not actually asking for permission.

[dralley]

No worries.

[kbrwn]

> where did you hear that CentOS Stream didn't receive security patches? That is false...

It's not false under the context of long term support which is why I highlighted so in the OP. How long will each CentOS Stream release be supported? How long with each CentOS Stream release receive security patches?

[dralley]

5 to 5.5 years - the same as RHEL "full support" phase.

[kbrwn]

5 years is half of the Ubuntu LTS and the previous CentOS Linux lifecycle. This is why many consider CentOS Stream to be a significant departure from CentOS Linux. Not saying it is a bad OS but it is no longer a free Linux operating system with long term support.

[dralley]

>5 years is half of the Ubuntu LTS

No it isn't. Ubuntu LTS is supported for 5 years.

https://ubuntu.com/blog/what-is-an-ubuntu-lts-release

>An Ubuntu LTS is a commitment from Canonical to support and maintain a version of Ubuntu for five years.

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>Not saying it is a bad OS but it is no longer a free Linux operating system with long term support.

Ubuntu LTS is suppored for 5 years, Debian Stable is supported for 5 years, and OpenSUSE Leap is supported 5 years (as far as I can tell - the only documentation I found said "up to" 60 months).

CentOS Stream absolutely provides "long term" support.

[kbrwn]

Ubuntu LTS has an additional 5 years of security support through Extended Security Maintenance thus giving LTS releases a full 10 year lifecycle. https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

[fomine3]

> Unlike Debian Testing, CentOS Stream is _not_ a hybrid between major releases of RHEL (say, RHEL 8 and RHEL 9). It's frozen to a major release.

Thanks, I recognized it first! It should be more clearly advertised.

[Ottolay]

Why don't people make the effort to just move to Debian Stable? If you don't want to pay any money, relying on Redhat's goodwill always seemed precarious.

[bayindirh]

Because there's a big software stack from drivers to scientific software which is being developed for 10+ years (or even longer) for RH based distributions, or for CentOS/ScientificLinux specifically

Software development and verification is huge in scientific computing. It's not just "Meh, let's port it in a weekend and be done with it".

[hansel_der]

> It's not just "Meh, let's port it in a weekend and be done with it"

maybe time to get on with it.

[bayindirh]

I'm not sure that you understand the size of the task and the number of people and software packages involved.

Nevertheless, I'll try to call around to see who can start shortly. :)

[dvfjsdhgfv]

I think this applies to the whole community. For many years we just assumed we could runt CentOS forever. When RH bought them there was an initial shock but they quickly clarified CentOS is not going anywhere so we were happy. Now that it's gone I kind of regret I didn't insisted or at least kindly asked some vendors for Debian compatibility. I didn't because I didn't have to, an now we're all screwed.

[hansel_der]

> they quickly clarified CentOS is not going anywhere so we were happy. Now that it's gone ...

not to rub salt into the wound but relying on a single vendor could be considered technical debt.

[LambdaComplex]

> soul-successor

I think you just made a new malapropism by getting the "sole" in "sole successor" mixed up with the homophone "soul" and then relating it to "spiritual successor"

Both "sole successor" and "spiritual successor" are accurate descriptions in this case, so it works beautifully.

[bayindirh]

Heh, thanks!

Being tired and having a different mother tongue has its perks, it seems. :)