Subj : For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
To   : Nightfox
From : DaiTengu
Date : Fri Jun 07 2024 08:14 pm

  Re: For you SBBS Sysops operating on *NIX, what's your flavor?
  By: Nightfox to DaiTengu on Fri Jun 07 2024 10:02 am

 Da>> CentOS 7 is. CentOS 8 Stream and CentOS 9 Stream are not.  You've got a
 Da>> few years on 9, and a year or so on 8.

 Da>> The "Stream" distros though have swapped places with RHEL proper.  CentOS
 Da>> used to be built from the RHEL distros.  Now RHEL is built from CentOS.

 Ni> Ah, I've heard something about that.  I had the impression that CentOS as
 Ni> we know it will be discontinued.  Wikipedia even says CentOS is a
 Ni> "discontinued Linux distribution".  It sounds like CentOS Stream won't be
 Ni> much different than the current CentOS?


 Yeah, basically.  The rage over it is from enterprise customers.  CentOS stood for "Community Enterprise Operating System".  It's entire focus was around stability, and moving upstream of RHEL potentially reduces some of that stability.

One of the early CentOS founders went off and founded Rocky Linux, named for the original CentOS founder that died in 2004 at the age of 30.

The idea is to take the place of what CentOS was,  it's a 1:1 line-for-line clone of RHEL,  with the proprietary bits stripped out.  Rocky 9's EOL isn't until 2032.  

If super-stability isn't that important.  Fedora might be a good option. New Fedora versions come out about every 6 months or so.  Every once in awhile they fork Fedora to create the next version of CentOS.  CentOS 9 Stream (and RHEL 9) is based on Fedora 34  The current version of Fedora is 40, which was released in April.

Fedora 34 was released 3 years ago.

That doesn't mean CentOS 9 is an exact snapshot from Fedora 34 that will never be upgraded, but they try to keep libraries and things consistent/stable. The kernel stays around that version (5.11 I believe), and glibc really only gets bugfixes / security patches if required.   Basically major "new features" aren't generally introduced.  Most major updates/changes are bug fixes, security patches and support for hardware. 

That doesn't mean things can't be upgraded.  There are many official, and even more unofficial repositories that install newer versions of programs, but users potentially sacrifice stability when that's done.

DaiTengu

....All turtle thoughts are of turtle.

---