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Comment by blueblob | Hacker News Reader

If I understood correctly, CentOS Stream is a beta or a nightly for RedHat now?

As far as I can tell, it's going to be similar to Debian Testing, ie. a rolling-release distribution that will have security support. RHEL point releases will then be snapshots of that rolling release with their own security fixes.

I can see the use for such a distribution (run CI against CentOS stream to catch any potential breakage with upcoming RHEL changes) but I think the way they went about making this change is ... unfortunate.

EDIT:

To expand a bit, things may still turn out positive overall if Rocky Linux succeeds and Red Hat doesn't pull off any other silliness. There's an opportunity here for Red Hat to really open up RHEL development to interested parties via CentOS Stream, and so long as they maintain their commitment to publishing RHEL as free software and don't actively interfere with people building their own RHEL-compatible clones from the point releases, everyone wins in the end.

It's very different from Debian Testing. The closest comparison is to stable-proposed-updates - any given branch of CentOS Stream is still issuing minor updates for a single CentOS major release. The closest thing to Debian Testing would probably be Fedora, with Debian Unstable being comparable to Fedora Rawhide.

Unfortunately, Stream is not a rolling release like Arch. You will still be required to perform a full install of Stream 9 when it's released.

That is a very a good thing, not a downside. CentOS Stream is still a decent choice to run a server on (yes, not quite as good as the near-perfect RHEL clone that CentOS currently is), which would definitely not be the case if it was a "true" rolling release distro.

To have an Arch-like distro under the CentOS brand would not make any sense.

Debian Testing doesn't really have much in the way of security support, see https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing

Right, Debian Testing is not supported as an "operating system" in any way. It's just a place for Debian developers to test their changes.

I see this misunderstanding all over the net — people think that Debian Testing is more supported than Debian Unstable, when the reverse is true. The Debian project has serious problems with public communications and expectation management.

That's how I'm reading it.

And it's the exact opposite of what I relied upon CentOS for in the past.

In the past, CentOS was what I used when I needed a rock solid OS and software packages that could run for months, if not years, with few manual interventions.

Yeah, I myself used CentOS when I needed a 100% binary-compatible version of RHEL for free, without all the horse shit that RHEL forces you into (RHN, etc).

Oh well, I guess there's Oracle Unbreakable Linux to fill this gap until something better comes along.

Another possibility for those that are being affected by this: in the past when I had no choice but to use RHEL but didn't have an active RHN subscription, I just removed the RHN yum repos and replaced them with CentOS equivalents and everything worked out just fine.

In the event the CentOS repos get pulled, then I imagine one could do the same thing, but with Oracle's repos instead.

And when your company gets audited by Oracle and they find the repos, you’ll have a nice conversation about how you need to buy a bunch of oracle cloud bullshit or else you owe a bunch for support.

RHN is dead as a doornail, for the record. Replaced by RH Subscription Manager

“Old RHN was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that RHN was as dead as a doornail.”

With apologies to Charles Dickens[0].

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46/46-h/46-h.htm

You can see it like that, some fedoras (like 34) are going to be RHEL9. CentOS Stream is the beta/testfield for the next (or more then just the next) RHEL point release like from 8.3-8.4 or 8.3-8.5

CentOS Stream is effectively a rolling beta of minor releases of RHEL.

So, not a beta for RHEL 8->9->etc, but a beta for 8.1->8.2->8.3.

It seems comparable to openSUSE Leap.

openSUSE: Tumbleweed -> Leap -> SLES

RedHat: Fedorda -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL

No. openSUSE Leap is what centos was before. A community version of the enterprise distro. And unlike redhat, suse is actually moving towards converging the leap and enterprise codebases as much as they can in Leap 15.3

Yup, the only valid complaint I've seen about OpenSuse is the lower support window, "at least 36 months" for any major release.

I think most of the complainers don't realize how easy it is to upgrade OpenSuse compared to CentOS. It's like night and day. SLES also has kernel updates with no reboot and an immutable root version. Basically / is read-only and all patches are applied to a new snapshot that is mounted at next boot.

More like

Fedora -----------------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL

CentOS Stream is at most a couple of months ahead of RHEL, not true for Fedora.

you can't compare tumbleweed with fedora since fedora has "major releases" and a support window. tumbleweed is basically on the edge (with transactional-update support) i.e. there is no "system upgrade"

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