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CentOS vs CentOS Stream - LinuxConfig.org:
Up until a late 2020 announcement from Red Hat, CentOS Linux had a longstanding reputation as a dependable and enterprise-class Linux distribution. And now, the main purpose of CentOS is shifting. Along with that comes a name change to CentOS Stream.
In this article, we'll talk about this change of direction for CentOS, and what it means for the huge community of users and businesses that have relied on the distro for years. We'll also see what's next, as many users are left scrambling for a replacement so they can avoid switching to CentOS Stream.
[...] All of this leads users and businesses to one question. Should we continue using CentOS (CentOS Stream, that is), or do we shift to a different distribution? The biggest feature of CentOS was its (free) stability. Without it, many have no reason to continue using it.
[...] In this guide, we went over the shift of CentOS to CentOS Stream. You now know what this shift means for businesses and end users that have been relying on CentOS for years. We also saw alternatives to the "old" CentOS, for those that don't want to use CentOS Stream. Ultimately, the CentOS shift gives its users three options: switch to CentOS Stream, use a CentOS replacement, or distro hop entirely.
Previously:
CentOS Linux 8 Will End in 2021
Red Hat Introduces Free RHEL for Open-Source, Non-Profit Organizations
(Score: 1, Troll) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @01:10PM (24 children)
I don't know what enterprises CentOS is geared towards, but each time I tried CentOS has been the most awful Linux distro for development.
Every time I tries I found it 2-3 years lagging with the toolset and available libraries; and building a more recent version of the libs I needed was an exercise in extreme masochism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Zappy on Monday March 22 2021, @01:30PM (17 children)
You have misunderstood the enterprise part. It is intended to be stable. If you need it to be bleeding edge you should select a different distro. An enterprise distro is for people who use the OS preferably without constantly needing to tinkering with it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @01:54PM (16 children)
I'm working for software development enterprises. I don't tinker the OS, I extend the tools and systems with extra functionality.
If "stable" means "do the things like 3 years ago", then I know that distro is not for software development.
Otherwise, for personal use, I'll pick whatever appropriate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 22 2021, @02:20PM (7 children)
So the end result of your work- the software you produce, won't run on 3 year old stable distros- the very machines you run at work?
It's okay if that's true, I'm just curious about how it all fits.
I'm sure you know there have been significant problems with Linux over the years, in that library changes break things. I vote for better and broader compatibility...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @03:31PM (6 children)
Team-lead: we tend to break stuff. We need a small CI to take care of building/testing before we join our code in the master.
Me: huh! I fucking know nothing about Jenkins but I see the point. Anywho, I'll also promise nothing but I'll give it a try.
Team-lead: here's the c# code for the SCM client we're using for the last couple of years. Resembles git but handles big binary blobs more efficient. Get in touch @X in IT to ask for VM-es that you need.
...
X Sure, mate, what do you want, CentOS or Windows10?
Me: let me try a CentOS first, should be OK with Mono and OpenJDK.
...
Me (couple of days later): fuck! Just gimme a Win10, I wasted too much time already with Jenkins asking for a higher Java version and I can't compile neither OpenJDK nor Mono from sources with a gcc 4 years old.
Me (one week later): there you have it, Team-lead. No auth on Jenkins, basic pipelines, if you want more, let's talk Groovy - need a couple of weeks to get my head around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday March 22 2021, @04:30PM (1 child)
Suddenly my jobs seem easy... Thanks.
So are you forced to use the old CentOS distro VM? Can you spin your own?
I don't think I've ever tried it, but I believe Fedora is your cutting-edge distro? (the updating might break you mid-development cycle...)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @09:52PM
That's what the IT were instructed to offer as for linux. 'Cause, see, "enterprise".
Last year they added Ubuntu to the list of distros on offer.
I could spin whatever distro I wanted, on my local workstation, in VirtualBox.
But I wasn't keen to make a "business critical server" for the team from my workstation and the IT guys wouldn't run other distos with them responsible to apply the security updates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:17PM
CentOS is the base OS plus packages. Required software for development, etc. should be made available on your team repository to fetch. Note that even if you were working with "the latest" OS distribution, there are inevitably software packages you will need that don't come with the OS, so there's no getting around requiring a team repository to host your "extras." The fact that you don't have that shows that you work in a lame environment with a substandard software build and versioning practice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:28PM (1 child)
Why on earth are you compiling your software libraries, etc. from source?
You can get them prebuilt as rpms.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @09:40PM
There weren't any at a version that the two things that were needed to run required.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @06:43PM
And you call yourself a developer. You don't know crap about what enterprise stability means. But you sure can run your mouth about it. Stick to windows and keep your mis-informed CentOS thoughts to yourself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by drussell on Monday March 22 2021, @02:32PM
It is not intended for software development.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Tuesday March 23 2021, @04:27AM (1 child)
Enterprise OS is 3 to 8 years ago. People who are using it don't want replacing OS every 2 years or dramatic changes in interface. So developers have to deal with it.
They do come with devtoolsets that are compatible with the OS but a bit more modern...live with it or convince your users to change OS every year and relearn API/ABIs at that speed.
Whether you like it or not it is succesful ...look at the support and timeline of release of RHEL.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 23 2021, @06:28AM
My users are fellow developers. They hate when their development environ crashes and they also hate if they need to code in C++11 or dotnet 1.x or Java 1.7 or Python 2.0 in 2019.
The restriction of CentOS or Win10 was placed by the IT. Elevated since then to include ubuntu too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:26AM (3 children)
If you work for more than one enterprise (i.e., you are a freelancer), then use whatever is best for you. If you work for a single enterprise (i.e., you are an employee), you will appreciate that the company e-mail, web site, and possibly the payroll database are up 24/7, without having to worry whether the latest OS update will bring them down. Chances are that if these services are running on a Linux machine, that machine is running a stable, long-term support distribution, such as CentOS. Developer machines are an entirely different matter. There, you want the latest and greatest; not all software being run by an enterprise is enterprise software.
Our mail and web servers are running CentOS 7 and will probably stay that way, until CentOS 7 becomes EOL. (We upgraded to CentOS 7 from CentOS 5, when it became EOL, skipping CentOS 6 completely.) Development machines are running whatever it takes to do the job, be it Windows 10 or a recent version of various Linux distributions.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:46AM (2 children)
Hence my "CentOS has been the most awful Linux distro for development."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by drussell on Wednesday March 24 2021, @06:22PM (1 child)
Yes, but then you are using the wrong tool for the job, and then blaming the tool.
You can try to insert a screw with a hammer and it might even kinda work, but then going on to blaming the hammer for not being a very good screwdriver is kinda silly.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday March 24 2021, @10:56PM
Blaming it? How?
I said
which sounds very much aligned with your "wrong tool for the job".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday March 23 2021, @01:02PM
I don't know what enterprises you have in worked in, but mine was still used Windows XP when it officially became unsupported by Microsoft. Companies run OSes that that will run the software they need, and they do not apply updates unless they are needed to run new software and only after months or years of tests to make sure it will not negatively effect the running of mission critical software.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 22 2021, @01:58PM (3 children)
What Zappy said. If you need/want a stable or enterprise distro, you're going to be a year or more behind any bleeding edge development tools. I ran into that very problem on a Debian/Devuan based distro. Pulled something from Sid because I wanted it, then I ran into dependency hell, and finally dist-upgraded to make stuff work again.
Pick your poison and run with it, don't try to mix two, three, or even more poisons in the same beaker.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday March 22 2021, @03:49PM (2 children)
Yes, I know.
3 years behind is the blunt edge, tho.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Zappy on Monday March 22 2021, @04:27PM (1 child)
You do realise an enterprise distro will be supported for around 10 years.
Towards the end of the support cycle you will be 11-12 years out of date with the bleeding edge. This is okay for people using the OS though and something you might want to consider is you are a developer creating stuff you want people to use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @07:39PM
Take SoylentNews for example. I doubt most of us SN users will be that unhappy if the SN UI never changed for >20 years assuming it still kept working with available web browsers or whatever replaced them.
But say if the stuff needed to run SN kept going out of support (DB, language, webserver, OS etc) then the SN team will need to keep doing work to migrate/port it. Work that doesn't really improve stuff for the users. Like spending energy to run on a treadmill just to stay in the same spot.
So if the OP's stuff can't work with stuff 3 years ago it's probably not "Enterprise" ready. My stuff can work with Solaris and AIX from ages ago and the latest Windows 10 (well OK the latest Windows 10 that actually works ;) ).
You shouldn't build enterprise stuff on things that will stop working every few years just because some noob nerd in a basement decides to break compatibility because "the new stuff is better".
How many large enterprises run only one simple app? If they have to keep spending time, money and resources migrating stuff every 3 years just to _try_ to keep stuff working (not always successfully!), you'll start to understand why some large companies still use COBOL and pay IBM etc millions to keep running nearly the same stuff they've been running for decades. At least there's a higher chance the stuff will still work!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @04:19PM
I think it is used where you are supplying an appliance that just needs to run forever. You don't develop on it, you develop first and then make sure it will run forever on CentOS. I know it was used as the operating system on the controllers for Xerox industrial printers.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday March 22 2021, @05:48PM
Not really enterprise; My small business employer needs a pair of database systems, but is hostile to IT spending. Approval for moving from (very old) legacy systems to something at least hosted on Linux required using a free distribution. The most crucial database is only supported on Redhat, the other is supported on Redhat and OS work is 'extra' nights and weekends work for me so I want both to run the same OS - so CentOS is a pragmatic choice.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Teckla on Monday March 22 2021, @01:20PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 22 2021, @08:24PM
I'm unsure why you've been modded funny. Insightful seems more appropriate.
I started planning for moving all my Redhat stuff to another distro as soon as IBM bought them.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @08:37PM
i would be curious as to what you think the downsides/threats are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @02:10PM
another day, another distro
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @02:27PM (3 children)
If you need Enterprise whatevers, you can just use openSUSE Leap. Last I heard, they even using binaries from the enteprise distro so you can upgrade to paid subscription without reinstalling anything.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday March 22 2021, @02:48PM (2 children)
The old relationship was:
SLES --- Redhat Enterprise
Leap --- CentOS / Fedora
Tumbleweed --- ? (I am not aware of a rolling redhat distro before stream)
Now:
SLES --- Redhat Enterprise
Leap --- Fedora [does it really count?]
Tumbleweed --- CentOS steam
Redhat/IBM has aligned now with what many other distributions do, arguably, with a strange slant. There seems to be duplication between the second tier versions Fedora and CentOS. Of course, there are historic reasons with CentOS eating RedHat's lunch to be bought and now, killed off. Suse takes the other route. Make it as simple as possible to switch to the enterprise distro. Probably it is the better long term strategy. Krishna seems to take his pages from Rometty's book, milking his current position for short term profits. I guess, in the end, Fedora and Stream will interact in a similar way that Leap and Tumbleweed do (the former being periodically pulled from the latter).
(Score: 4, Informative) by DECbot on Monday March 22 2021, @04:13PM (1 child)
While I can see where you get your correlations between Suse and Redhat, but despite RH advertising Centos Stream as rolling, it is not rolling. Centos Stream is staging for RHEL--it sits between Fedora and RHEL to test the packages and develop against before the next point release of RHEL.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @08:28PM
I think it is actually rolling, but not off rawhide, off fedora instead.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @02:46PM
Not really a comparison.
Just an ad for alma Linux aka cloud Linux.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tokolosh on Monday March 22 2021, @03:45PM (3 children)
Which on has the best Code of Conduct? Because that is naturally the best one.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @05:59PM (2 children)
Not just the CoC!
How can you pick a distro without knowing the race and gender of the Devs?
(Is today's tribalism worse or just brazen instead of deceitful?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @05:49AM (1 child)
ugh
the gender war
something that only makes sense to people who identify binary and only know heterosexuality
wouldn't a true feminist identify non-binary? What do the philosophers and left-feminists say?
Anyway, I still find it interesting that homophobic slurs and slurs that imply a person without a womb has no value if they haven't conquered a womb are the first things the SJWs reach for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 23 2021, @05:56AM
Note that GP is also afraid of CoCs. Homosexual contact threatens to make GP less of a man, because if he gives into bishounen temptation then he will no longer conquer wombs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 22 2021, @08:32PM
Instead of only packaging what RHEL wants to use, package all of Fedora. Then CentOS Stream gets much more interesting as a distro. A further-stabilized, rolling fedora combined with dnf-automatic? hell yes! Then, if Fedora would package everything under the sun, the pair would be *very* popular.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Tuesday March 23 2021, @10:44AM
https://rockylinux.org/ [rockylinux.org]
Essentially, Rocky Linux will be trying to take the place that CentOS used to have before RedHat/IBM announced their scheme for grabbing money from what appears to be "freeloaders" in their opinion.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P