Longest supported distribution

Oracle Linux is also a rebuild of RHEL, as was CentOS until Red Hat killed it. Oracle (their past shenanigans aside) also ship with their 'Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel' which is much more up to date than the stock RHEL one (though you have the option to boot with that too).

Once Rocky Linux is up and running ('soon'), it too will provide the same RHEL experience, including the support window. For servers and some workstations, this is great. For home users, desktops etc, not so much. Do you really envisage using the same hardware and software for TEN years? No version updates, no new stuff... Nope.
 
Rainmaker said:
Oracle Linux is also a rebuild of RHEL, as was CentOS until Red Hat killed it. Oracle (their past shenanigans aside) also ship with their 'Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel' which is much more up to date than the stock RHEL one (though you have the option to boot with that too).

Once Rocky Linux is up and running ('soon'), it too will provide the same RHEL experience, including the support window. For servers and some workstations, this is great. For home users, desktops etc, not so much. Do you really envisage using the same hardware and software for TEN years? No version updates, no new stuff... Nope.
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Holy Moly... I'm using CentOS on a couple of boxes at work. Hadn't heard about CentOS being killed off. Thanks for the heads up, Rainmaker... will need to migrate them over to something else eventually.
 
Derp said:
Holy Moly... I'm using CentOS on a couple of boxes at work. Hadn't heard about CentOS being killed off. Thanks for the heads up, Rainmaker... will need to migrate them over to something else eventually.
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You managed to miss that? :eek: It was a huge scandal the other week. Red Hat have not just killed CentOS as in "they're not releasing any more after this". They've also killed the almost brand new current version, which was supposed to be EOL in 2029 and is now useless - after many enterprises have rolled it out into production. :mad: You can probably thank the IBM takeover for that, but RH gonna RH.

All its support, security patches and updates for all versions now stops this year. You'll need to migrate away sooner than later. You're realistically looking at Oracle, Rocky Linux from the original CentOS creator ('coming soon') or - perhaps most favourable overall - Alma Linux from the people who make CloudOS. They have a long proven track record, have a huge amount of money behind them, are already invested in repackaging RHEL for their existing business, and they're open source friendly *cough* IBM/Red Hat *cough*. They will be providing a simple shell script to swap the repos over from existing CentOS installs and to 'convert' them to Alma (or Rocky) going forward. Easy enough in theory.

Of course there's always Debian and OpenSUSE (or Ubuntu LTS + extended support), but I imagine you'd prefer to stay RHEL compatible.
 
@Derp and @Rainmaker There's quite a long article from a RedHat employee on the CentOS change that's worth a read: http://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-stream-change-think-about/ and his fielding of comments to the article.

I run a CentOS 8 box at home for assorted stuff (plex, file shares, docker, kubernetes ....), primarily because work is a Redhat shop and I don't want to learn a new ecosystem. I'm sitting on the fence as to exactly what to do and as I don't need to make a decision for 6 to 9 months I'm waiting to see the dust clear. If I had to move today, CentOS stream would work for me: I don't need the fabled permanent uptime, and as I found in August ( see https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/redhat-centos-upgrade-warning.18894792/ ) its not the holy grail of reliability that some of the people I'm reading with their wailing and gnashing of teeth are making out.

For the little guy the change coming up later this month to allow 16 full redhat systems on a free developer subscription looks very tempting.
 
Thanks, @Rainmaker and @peterwalkley . Appreciate the info you've both shared. One of my boxes is just used for running Nessus so not too worried about that one, but the other one runs Graylog which is a bit more challenging... There's a Debian-flavoured version of Graylog so maybe I'll switch to that just for simplicity.
 
Scientific Linux is a decent RHEL clone

They've traditionally always offered decent patching for a long time - SL is an RHEL rebuild much like centos was - though I don't think they've dropped an RHEL8 derived release yet
 
BongoHunter said:
Scientific Linux is a decent RHEL clone

They've traditionally always offered decent patching for a long time - SL is an RHEL rebuild much like centos was - though I don't think they've dropped an RHEL8 derived release yet
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Scientific Linux isn't being released any more (no v8 forthcoming).

As per previous posts your choices are:

Alma Linux (from the CloudLinux folks)
Oracle Linux
Rocky Linux (CentOS founders' new fork)

Or else RHEL on the new free 'dev' subscription as announced by RH.. Or CentOS but with the new stream setup.
 
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