RHEL8-Based CentOS 8.0 Slated To Be Released Next Week

[mroche]

Nice desktop. Systemd and wayland.

Been using it for several months now, it’s a joy to use and major upgrade coming from RHEL 7 (no pun intended). Not sure if we’ll see the GNOME 3.34 updates until April when 8.2 drops or if they’ll backport it to the current 3.28.

If they strip the H264 from chromium-browser and firefox, they could from VLC to.
and if they don't, then just use a web browser to play your video.

They don’t strip x264 support from Firefox. The browser detects and calls on the libavformat or libavcodec (can’t remember which) at runtime which provides the necessary codecs (assuming it was built with them). These come from ffmpeg. FFmpeg can’t ship with Fedora as the Fedora base repos have a strict open-source only and no patent ideology. That’s why ffmpeg is in RPMFusion.

Cheers,
Mike

[You-]

A web browser that struggles with videos is more forgivable than a video play that doesnt play videos.

[elatllat]

...pay royalties to ship with things like H264...

If they strip the H264 from chromium-browser and firefox, they could from VLC to.
and if they don't, then just use a web browser to play your video.

[nomadewolf]

Can't wait to update my home server

[Britoid]

I'm actually not sure why RHEL8 and derivatives do struggle so much on the video playback front. Is there some complexity I am missing? For example VLC is missing currently from the rpmfusion repos (the VLC website say it is a work in progress and that they are the ones creating the package?). For RHEL7 we had to use the nux desktop repository for quite a while too.

VLC is a very popular video player in the corporate world / enterprise so it isn't exactly low priority. How are they going to run all those videos they need during team building exercises?

Because RH (well now IBM) is a large American company and can't risk being the target of a patent lawsuit. You have to pay royalties to ship with things like H264 support (which includes it being in the official Fedora repos).

[kpedersen]

I'm actually not sure why RHEL8 and derivatives do struggle so much on the video playback front. Is there some complexity I am missing? For example VLC is missing currently from the rpmfusion repos (the VLC website say it is a work in progress and that they are the ones creating the package?). For RHEL7 we had to use the nux desktop repository for quite a while too.

VLC is a very popular video player in the corporate world / enterprise so it isn't exactly low priority. How are they going to run all those videos they need during team building exercises?

[SyXbiT]

That’s something that’s changing with RHEL 8. Red Hat is aiming at releases every 6 months for R8 during the Phase 1 support cycle, and they appear to be on track with that. RHEL 8.1 is due out in October (beta’s been out for a long while now). With the release of 8.0, everything needed to rebuild RHEL is in place and ready, so delays will likely be back to what they were before for point releases. Historically, X.0 releases have taken a long while (though 7 moved rather fast). However, the team doesn’t work on CentOS full time, they have other responsibilities which adds to what’s going on. Limited time is the bane of development.

So if you’re waiting for C8, might as well wait for 8.1. EPEL will be a bit more fleshed out, and RPM Fusion’s rebuilds may be done by then. ELRepo has already been supporting RHEL 8 for a while now, but I’m not sure how many kmods they support. The have been rebuilding the mainline kernel, though.

Cheers,
Mike

I have a few hobby projects running CentOS, and I usually have them for years with minimal touching after install. Some are at family members houses, where I'd really not like to encounter upgrade issues. The 10 years lifecycle makes this perfect.
If I didn't want the 10 years of patching, I'd almost certainly switch to Debian. More frequent releases, and an enormous repo which makes EPEL unnecessary.

[mroche]

Their unpredictable releases and delays from CentOS drive people to Ubuntu. It's a pity because RHEL does the bulk of the work. They deserve to get the users.

That’s something that’s changing with RHEL 8. Red Hat is aiming at releases every 6 months for R8 during the Phase 1 support cycle, and they appear to be on track with that. RHEL 8.1 is due out in October (beta’s been out for a long while now). With the release of 8.0, everything needed to rebuild RHEL is in place and ready, so delays will likely be back to what they were before for point releases. Historically, X.0 releases have taken a long while (though 7 moved rather fast). However, the team doesn’t work on CentOS full time, they have other responsibilities which adds to what’s going on. Limited time is the bane of development.

So if you’re waiting for C8, might as well wait for 8.1. EPEL will be a bit more fleshed out, and RPM Fusion’s rebuilds may be done by then. ELRepo has already been supporting RHEL 8 for a while now, but I’m not sure how many kmods they support. The have been rebuilding the mainline kernel, though.

Cheers,
Mike

[SyXbiT]

There are a lot of companies who rely on CentOS, and this has taken a really, really long time, with very low visibility.
I get it's free, and beggars can't be choosers, but actually they can. Debian has been on a roll recently, with very predictable release cycle and stability that's similar to RHEL. I fear that Red Hat should have made RHEL totally free years ago. Their unpredictable releases and delays from CentOS drive people to Ubuntu. It's a pity because RHEL does the bulk of the work. They deserve to get the users.

[hubick]

I gave up waiting and bought RHEL 8. It's just my personal workstation (we also use RHEL at work), but it's still about time I supported them, and I'm kinda tired of the Fedora treadmill. I'm hoping CentOS 8's release may spur rpmfusion to fill out a bit - it currently won't let me install ffmpeg due to missing SDL2, so I don't get a lot of video in Firefox (Chrome ships codecs, but I don't wanna switch full time).