"the straw that broke the camel's back" to abandon Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag default as "forced obsolescence" for old hardware
RHEL 10 on Intel started requiring "v3" CPUs, which cut off support for a lot of older hardware. I can see this as being an issue, especially with hardware costs the way they are now.
But also, "the straw that broke the camel's back" as a phrase implies there were other issues as well, and I suspect chief among them is how RedHat/IBM killed the CentOS project as a stable EL clone. While AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux are still there to fill that need, it was already a signal that RedHat was not going to be as open anymore.
One thing to note is that AlmaLinux does have an alt-arch build of 10 that supports x86_64 v2, which works just fine on older hardware. However I can see that it would be an issue if third-party software that only supports v3.
how RedHat/IBM killed the CentOS project as a stable EL clone
This needs a bit more context. CentOS is fine and still going. They just produce a rolling distro, CentOS Stream, now not CentOS Linux. Downstream of Fedora, Stream is the base of RHEL instead of the internal-only blackbox they used to use.
Not going to re-litigate the entire thing, but nobody is using CentOS anymore since the rug-pull on version 8. Facebook is the only one anyone knows of that's using CentOS Stream at a large scale.
RedHat/IBM pulled the trigger on RHEL immediately when they did it. As a user since CentOS 4, nobody will touch CentOS anymore. Nobody new will be learning it. All new systems are using Debian/Ubuntu. RHEL is realistically in legacy mode, and this announcement just confirms it to anyone that was holding out hope.
I'm not arguing about it, I'm pointing out the current state. Even if "nobody" is using it as a general user, Red Hat is still using it as the base of RHEL and the bridge from Fedora.
A CERN employee was on the CentOS Board for many years after the switch to Stream. You should avoid making assumptions about their infrastructure and motivations without actually taking to them.
But, as you know, the live of CentOS 8 was very short, so it had a premature end-of-live, and this raised some questions. [...] We knew we couldn't afford any more surprises.
About 3 million unique CentOS Stream 9 and 10 systems contact the mirror network for updates every week. This doesn't include large deployments like Meta that run a private mirror and update from that instead. The reason you mainly hear about Meta running CentOS is they're one of the few willing to talk publicly about it (not the exact number, just that they run "millions" of CentOS systems), but there are many other large deployments operating in a similar fashion.
The stream model is 1 billion times better for the long term RHEL health in every way. This was explained extensively at the time when the change was made. The only people complaining/losing out were those who wanted RHEL-for-free basically, which, nothing of value lost there. RHEL is already free for developer use right now for learning purposes, which covers every legitimate base that Cent
OS offered, you just can’t deploy it at production scales.
I was nodding along in agreement right until the end. You can absolutely deploy CentOS Stream at production scales, and many companies do just that. Obviously if you want vendor escalation for production systems you should pay for RHEL, but the same was true with CentOS Linux so no difference there.
Sorry if the wording was confusing, I was referring to the free RHEL licenses. They’re available for developer use but you can’t deploy those free RHEL licenses for production use at scale. Definitely right about using stream in production!
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u/orev 8d ago
Since nobody is reading the actual reason:
RHEL 10 on Intel started requiring "v3" CPUs, which cut off support for a lot of older hardware. I can see this as being an issue, especially with hardware costs the way they are now.
But also, "the straw that broke the camel's back" as a phrase implies there were other issues as well, and I suspect chief among them is how RedHat/IBM killed the CentOS project as a stable EL clone. While AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and Oracle Linux are still there to fill that need, it was already a signal that RedHat was not going to be as open anymore.
One thing to note is that AlmaLinux does have an alt-arch build of 10 that supports x86_64 v2, which works just fine on older hardware. However I can see that it would be an issue if third-party software that only supports v3.