CentOS 7 1804 Released As The Free Spin Of RHEL 7.5

[phoronix]

Phoronix: CentOS 7 1804 Released As The Free Spin Of RHEL 7.5

CentOS 7 1804 is now available as the latest release of this leading "community spin" of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The 1804 update to CentOS 7 is based on last month's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=CentOS-7-1804-Released

[SyXbiT]

I prefer RHEL's stability to Ubuntus, but I really like the predictable nature of Ubuntu's releases (maybe Red Hat is right, and predictable releases are bad, and you should release when ready).
I feel like it's a chicken an egg problem though. RHEL gets delayed because they're trying to get some features ready (like systemd). They know if they miss it, it's a long time before the next release. Maybe if they had more frequent releases it wouldn't matter so much if they delayed a feature. Still, it's not a fair comparison because Red Hat does a massive amount of engineering work on core stuff vs Ubuntu.
Either way, if I needed to deploy a new app in the cloud, or provision enterprise workstations right now, I'd have a hard time picking a 3.5 year old RHEL vs a brand new Ubuntu.

[RahulSundaram]

Either way, if I needed to deploy a new app in the cloud, or provision enterprise workstations right now, I'd have a hard time picking a 3.5 year old RHEL vs a brand new Ubuntu.

I don't see why. RHEL 7 for instance has very recent versions of Firefox, Libreoffice, GNOME etc since they rebase workstation apps even if the original release is older. Also note that RHEL releases are supported for much longer than Ubuntu LTS. You can't release often and have that kind of support cycle.

[nomadewolf]

Is the 1804 just to beat M$'s Windows 10 1803?...

[nomadewolf]

I prefer RHEL's stability to Ubuntus, but I really like the predictable nature of Ubuntu's releases (maybe Red Hat is right, and predictable releases are bad, and you should release when ready).
I feel like it's a chicken an egg problem though. RHEL gets delayed because they're trying to get some features ready (like systemd). They know if they miss it, it's a long time before the next release. Maybe if they had more frequent releases it wouldn't matter so much if they delayed a feature. Still, it's not a fair comparison because Red Hat does a massive amount of engineering work on core stuff vs Ubuntu.
Either way, if I needed to deploy a new app in the cloud, or provision enterprise workstations right now, I'd have a hard time picking a 3.5 year old RHEL vs a brand new Ubuntu.

Interesting points.
My take on the matter is something like this:
-It's not like predictable is bad. It's just that in a server oriented OS it's best to have stability.
-RHEL actually has fairly low time between releases, IMO. The real 'problem' is that - for stability's sake - new features get delayed and take longer to get merged. Which in turn goes back to the whole stability thing...


Bottom line:
Ubuntu is a great distro, and being predictable is also a great thing. Furthermore, their LTS releases are really good and stable.
That said, i ended up switching Ubuntu for CentOS simply because CentOS is predictably stable, especially when you put the system through several updates.

[RahulSundaram]

it's because projects that I'm working on will use these os'es as a bases. why? because people don't want to deal with third part repos to get new php?

CentOS SCL is a first party repo and it has newer version of PHP.

[the_scx]

in terms of server things sometimes you need to upgrade packages. and that's why installing new ubuntu can be faster than dealing with all necesary updates. I'm using centos on my vps, but for most projects I use debian/ubuntu - not because I want to use it, it's because projects that I'm working on will use these os'es as a bases. why? because people don't want to deal with third part repos to get new php?

Haven't you heard about the RH SCL (Red Hat Software Collections) and RH Devtoolset (Red Hat Developer Toolset)? It is available for CentOS too. You can also use Remi repo as an alternative for PHP packages.

SCL 3.1 provides:
- Red Hat Developer Toolset 7.1
- Eclipse 4.6.3
- Perl 5.24.0/5.26.1
- PHP 7.0.27/7.1.8
- Python 2.7.13/3.5.1/3.6.3
- Ruby 2.3.6/2.4.3/2.5.0
- Ruby on Rails 4.2.6/5.0.1
- Scala 2.10.6
- MariaDB 10.1.29/10.2.8
- MongoDB 3.2.10/3.4.9/3.6.3
- MySQL 5.7.21
- PostgreSQL 9.5.9/9.6.5/10.3
- Node.js 4.6.2/6.11.3/8.9.4
- nginx 1.8.1/1.10.2/1.12.1
- Apache httpd 2.4.27
- Varnish Cache 4.0.3/5.2.1
- Maven 3.3.9/3.5.0
- Git 2.9.3
- Redis 3.2.4
- HAProxy 1.8.4
- Common Java Packages

Devtoolset 7.1 provides:
- GCC (GCC 7.3.1, binutils 2.28, elfutils 0.170, dwz 0.12, GDB 8.0.1, ltrace 0.7.91, strace 4.17, memstomp 0.1.5, SystemTap 3.1, Valgrind 3.13.0, OProfile 1.2.0, Dyninst 9.3.2, make 4.2.1)
- LLVM Toolset (lang 5.0.1, lldb 5.0.1, CMake 3.6.2, compiler-rt 5.0.1, llvm 5.0.1, ibomp 5.0.1, python-lit 0.5.1)
- Rust Toolset (rust 1.25.0, cargo 0.26.0, cargo-vendor 0.1.13)
- Go Toolset (goland 1.8.7)

You can also use older version of RH SCL/Devtoolset if you want.

[the_scx]

in terms of server things sometimes you need to upgrade packages. and that's why installing new ubuntu can be faster than dealing with all necesary updates. I'm using centos on my vps, but for most projects I use debian/ubuntu - not because I want to use it, it's because projects that I'm working on will use these os'es as a bases. why? because people don't want to deal with third part repos to get new php?

See also:
- https://access.redhat.com/documentat...e_collections/
- https://access.redhat.com/documentat...loper_toolset/

[RahulSundaram]

"
# 3. Start using the software collection: $ scl enable rh-php71 bash" it should be a bit better documented how to use it with apache/nginx. anyway - it's not about me - I'm using packages from Remi Collet repo. for some reason more than 75% of projects that I'm working on is using debian/ubuntu as a base.

Enabling a scl by default is trivial. Just throw it into /etc/profile.d or.bash_profile. Then you configure it with Apache or Nginx just as you normally would.

People can use whatever they want to. I am just addressing the idea that Red Hat/CentOS do not ship with newer packages. That's just not true. Desktop applications are refreshed more often than any other LTS distro. It offers newer server packages as non default options for stability.