RHEL might be open source but it is structured (obviously) to sell the support license. You can't "just" install DRBD like on every other distro, you need to get the storage whatever the fuck pack, or get the packages from EPEL. In Debian DRBD module just comes with kernel, need to install it on RHEL etc.
It's annoying to manage even as paid customer and wholly worse experience than just installing Debian.
But still Rocky Linux is possible only because Red Hat provides sources for its distribution. There’s no Rocky Windows.
All that is mostly solved with CentOS. I really don't get the people so upset about it.
This is why we also migrating to Rocky on such systems.
And that's for my pets. The cattle is blissfully unaware of anything different.
My CentOS boxes are pulling straight from 9 stream. I had an issue with Grafana today I’m still figuring out.
If we decide we can’t afford 100% RHEL licensing, Alma was my choice, but I see so many choosing Rocky, and I’m genuinely curious why people are doing that.
The primary purpose of CentOS Stream is this: to allow a real community to be built around CentOS, where partners and users can contribute. With CentOS if you encountered a bug your only option was to file it against RHEL (not CentOS), wait for someone at Red Hat to get to it, then wait for RHEL to pick it up and release it. You would be very lucky for that whole process to complete within 6 months and if you're not a customer you probably won't be able to test a hotfix on your own systems.
Whereas with Stream: partners and downstream developers can file issues directly against Stream, and then contribute fixes directly to Stream, where they get QA'd in public and are added directly to the future release of RHEL. So Oracle Linux, Rocky, Alma and anyone else can actually participate in the process and contribute back instead of having to just take whatever RH throws over the wall.
However, the messaging and timelines around all of this were handled... not well, and some of the acrimony around that is reasonable even if the changes make sense.
In any case, I get the justification for CentOS stream, but changing CentOS 8's EoL from 2029, to Jan 1st 2020 ... after it shipped is definitely a good way to alienate your customers and community.
Fedora moves fast enough that by the time a RHEL release comes out, Fedora has moved far enough to not be very relevant as an upstream.
Even if Stream had versions, it’s still only tracking about a minor release ahead of RHEL. If you trusted RHEL’s QE process before, there’s little reason to stop trusting it. I really don’t think much has changed in terms of usage outside of some infrequently used software, but you have to account for that when managing them on a RHEL system, too, so I still don’t really understand the problem.
We have a couple thousand Alma 8 in production and it’s been smooth sailing.
> sometimes break things in unexpected ways
I have faith on RH to keep CentOS stream to be quite stable now that it runs on its own brand.
I can't understand how people had super faith on CentOS when it was run by a community which even had someone lock up the organization's fund/asset at some point.
People believe that CentOS was the same RHEL for free. Bit to bit. May be with changed logos.
So people believed that they’ll get rock stable system for free by using CentOS. They believed it so much that it hurted RHEL sales.
None of those beliefs were correct. But lost sales were real.
We’re a supercomputing center. We’re federated. Everybody is using CentOS. So, we also use CentOS on our pets sometimes because it reduces administration load.
We’re using it for years. We can patch it if we need it. We can submit patches if we need it. We use CentOS as a multinational community, which is completely different from “Hey, look! Free RHEL!”.
We’ll see where we gonna evolve. Stream? Rocky? Alma? It’s will be a collective decision. For some pets we migrated to Rocky, and we’re happy, for now.
Being founded by former CentOS founder also helped. MySQL guys found Maria, CentOS founder started Rocky. That’s OK in my book.
You're talking about a community problem (which most community have at some time and I don't believe for a second that companies don't have these kinds of events or worse) when people are talking about what they liked and actually observed to be good for them in centos. Yes, work should be paid. True also that some things can bring more customers without being profitable by themselves. Yes people are allowed to be angry about a bait and switch.
One can be sad and angry that a service that one used to rely on is discontinued or made very expensive.
Besides, do all those people complaining have projects that are very sensitive to stability that CentOS stream is going to ruin? That is quite hard to believe.
Not sure if it was even a bait when people just chose to use it and CentOS never locked you up in using it.
Most of the whining sounds very childish.