Oracle Linux Looking To Attract CentOS Users Looking For Alternatives

[birdie]

There's so much unhealthy hatred towards Oracle in this thread it's cringe worthy. But I've long got used to it How could you hate a company? LMAO. Aren't there better things in life to do than to have unhealthy emotions like hatred? What about doing something for the betterment of humankind instead?

[gabber]

pff, real man use Arch on their servers.

[andre30correia]

redhat take over Centos to closed it after few years and only oracle is evil?

[zxy_thf]

Why not Fedora? I thought this to be the closest to Red Hat?

As a Fedora and CentOS user I would say Fedora might be the second to the most distant (major) distribution from RHEL/CentOS. (The most distant one is Arch).

Each version of Fedora is only supported for 13 months. This sounds better than Ubuntu (9 months), but commonly Fedora users would rush to the next version when it's released (I've been even using Fedora Beta for a while), while most Ubuntu users only "jump" every two years to the next LTS release.

The other end of the spectrum is RHEL/CentOS. Commonly you just install, configure, and forget it. If not for the security updates you don't even want to reboot the system.
Yes RHEL is derived from some version of Fedora, but Linux software moves so fast nowadays, and RHEL/CentOS is a far cry from the current Fedora you're using.

The closest one to RHEL, well, I think it is SLES. Both RPM based, rooted into enterprise environment. For example, Cray OS is based on SLES.
(Although SLES defaults to KDE, but who cares the DE for a server OS lol)

[zxy_thf]

It would be great if Linux were standardized around RHEL, so that all other distros were binary compatible with it, which means ISVs could target just one distro instead of dozens of hundreds.

Python's manylinux is actually standardized around RHEL, but they changed the specification (PEP 0600) after manylinux2014 (CentOS 7).

Well in a few years we will see what's gonna happen...

[jaypatelani]

gabber Hardcore people use NetBSD on their server with pkgsrc And it has support cycle of atleast 5 years

[zxy_thf]

gabber Hardcore people use NetBSD on their server with pkgsrc And it has support cycle of atleast 5 years

Video game nerds use Gentoo

[mvniekerk86]

Being cloud native means not worrying about the data centre at the back and worrying which containers you're running on which Kubernetes environment.
So for me and my software, a non issue. It would've been smarter for CentOs to at least still offer the 6-monthly releases and keep support as to not have such a bad rep.

But hey, IBM.

[jabl]

Speaking of OL: even if Oracle suddenly decides to fuck with its users, you can always switch to another RHEL derivative so it doesn't matter whether they are "evil" or not. Most corporations are: they are in only for maximum profits and nothing else.

I think OL is relatively safe, but not because Oracle is a saint and they want to help humanity. But because Redhat is their competitor and by offering their core offering for free they hurt them. Also in a "commoditize your complement" sense, by pushing down the price of the underlying OS, they can charge customers correspondingly more for their own proprietary offerings on top.

And if that doesn't work out, there's always other options like that Ars article says.

[skeevy420]

Not exactly - ATI had been supporting open source driver development since the late '90's. We stopped briefly between ~2004 and 2007, partly because of increased DRM-related risk and partly because we had inherited a closed source Linux driver when we acquired FireGL and were trying to use that as a one-size-fits-all Linux driver.

One size fits all seems to never works out. When I hear that phrase I imagine the movie Twins and them buying a one size fits all shirt and it going horribly wrong. Very ironically funny that y'all went closed source during my Nvidia and Intel integrated years.

It turned out that the FireGL driver was a poor fit for consumer users, so when AMD bought us and was able to mitigate some of the DRM-related risk by having a separate (and larger) CPU revenue stream we jumped at the chance to restart open source driver support.

And we're glad y'all did. Opened up graphics like Radeon, AMDGPU, and even Intel makes using a system so much easier and reliable.

For the record we were not the ones who called the campus police on RMS that day

I gotta Google that story. Seems interesting.

Do you remember a while back we were having an AMDGPU-Pro conversation and you asked me (rhetorically) what distributions should be added and I said something around the lines of: "While I don't use it, Oracle Linux"? Well, as far as I can tell, there's one Pro piece of the puzzle Oracle is missing in order to attract the CentOS crowd