CentOS 8 Ending Next Year To Focus Shift On CentOS Stream

[cynic]

I agree that this is a mistake, but I would be interested to know what other mistakes you think they've made?

well, the other big one was dropping btrfs support (but I say so only because I really love it! from their POW it made perfectly sense)

[JPFSanders]

This is devastating. The company I work for is just starting to transition from CentOS 6 to 7 and now has no upgrade path from 7. We move very slowly so need 10 to 15 years of support. It will be curious to see what management does in light of this decision.

Well, let's not be too hasty, I'm optimistic in the sense that I guess CentOS will try to be not too reckless and will be judicious with the updates, I doubt it will become Fedora out of the blue and more like "Debian Unstable" which is 99.9% of the time rock solid.

[Vistaus]

That's not what is going to happen, by what can be read in the blog CentOS Stream X will just become kind of Debian Unstable of RHEL X, this is: if you're running CentOS Stream 8 now you will get the updates from the next RHEL point release (IE: 8.4) ahead of RHEL itself.

This means that you get to be the beta tester of the packages on the next RHEL point release if you run CentOS.

Still not sure if this is a good move or not, which doesn't inspire much confidence.

Don't you mean Debian Testing?

[pmorph]

Don't you mean Debian Testing?

Even testing will have periods when it is broken by "design" (major changes getting integrated). Or at least that's how it used to be when I was running it (admittedly many years ago).

[Vistaus]

Even testing will have periods when it is broken by "design" (major changes getting integrated). Or at least that's how it used to be when I was running it (admittedly many years ago).

Sure, but I was talking about the CentOS becoming a RHEL beta part. AFAIK Debian Testing is what will become Debian Stable, so CentOS Stream is more like Debian Testing than Debian Unstable in that regard.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Most companies who use RHEL I know off, chose RHEL because of the rich community ecosystem that was build around it thanks to having free binary compatible CentOS that could be used to test and build against by open source projects.

This looks like a serious shot into their own foot. It will at most win them some customers short term, but in the long term their product just became worse and less attractive.

Luckily this is Linux and there is competition. I don't think SuSE and Canonical will mind the opportunity

[Leinad]

Sure, but I was talking about the CentOS becoming a RHEL beta part. AFAIK Debian Testing is what will become Debian Stable, so CentOS Stream is more like Debian Testing than Debian Unstable in that regard.

There is nothing similar in Debian world. CentOs Stream is rolling version of NEXT MINOR VERSION, not major version.

[dovla091]

I'd like to hear how you think its a mistake?

Except it has become a test bed for RedHat/IBM and surely stability won't be stable as near as plain old CentOS distro... On top of that, do you seriously think that developers will keep "updating" their binaries to match every change in CentOS (I really doubt), meaning that this will no longer be a distro for LTS usages. Previous version would provide support for 10 years and now we will have yet another RHEL joke OS

[swagg_boi]

Uh oh... workstations at work are still on Scientific Linux 7 (just upgraded from 6 last year...)

I wonder if we'll have to buy RHEL subscriptions now (unless they wanna test/approve CentOS Stream)

[angrypie]

CentOS Stream still moves very slowly though. It's nothing like Fedora, let alone Rawhide.