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Comment by charlesdaniels | Hacker News Reader

Having been a Debian/Ubuntu person for a long time, and being somewhat dissatisfied with that ecosystem, I recently started evaluating CentOS for my use cases instead. I want something with a non-rolling update model, so I don't have to deal with my environment changing out from under me.

CentOS 8 had been mostly working well for me, barring a few missing packages that were easy to port over myself, and I was really thinking of moving all my boxes to CentOS. I'm glad this news came out before I did; I don't know what I'll use instead, but it definitely won't be CentOS/RHEL.

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I think there might be some confusion about "rolling" in the context of CentOS Stream. The updates are continuous and there's not released minor versions, but all changes are changes that are intended to _very shortly_ land in the next every-six-months minor release of RHEL. So you aren't going to suddenly see more "environment changing out from under me" than you would on RHEL or CentOS Linux.

Thank you for the answers in this thread.

I haven't tried CentOS Stream, but out of curiosity: if it's similar to the RHEL patch releases, how will major (like from RHEL 8 to 9) changes be handled?

OpenSuse, and Suse give you more control over minor release version changes. You have to manually change your repos with some scripts before you patch. The RH way of just rolling you from minor release to minor release invisibly has always kind of irritated me.

Yeah, to me this whole thing sounds like a failure of communication.

Most people (including me) never looked closely at "CentOS Streams"; from what you said, it seems like it's "a preview of the next RHEL 8.x". The announcement today made it appear as if it were "a preview of RHEL 9.0", which is a much bigger change for those who (like me) expect to install a CentOS 8 box somewhere and keep it mostly untouched (just applying the updates) for ten years.

Minor version updates in CentOS usually mean a new kernel ABI and things like ZFS break. I always have to wait to do minor version updates until a new ZFS version lands. Any idea how that’ll work?

Checkout openSUSE; I've been running it for the past year or so for my personal projects (and their rolling-release version for longer) and I've been pretty happy with it. It's not quite the same position as CentOS but still very stable and nice to work with.

I don't know what your use case is, but one of the flavors of BSD might be an option for you.

I am a big fan of OpenBSD, but unfortunately I still need some Linux only software. I do try out freeBSD’s Linux emulation layer every couple years, but it isn’t quite there yet for the stuff I need to run.

OpenSuse Leap, with XFS or BTRF sounds right for you.

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