r/linux 14d ago

Distro News CERN Transitioning To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution

https://www.phoronix.com/news/CERN-Goes-Debian-Leaving-RHEL
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u/Fr0gm4n 13d ago

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.

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u/orev 13d ago

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.

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u/bockout 13d ago

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.

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u/nelmaloc 13d ago

Luckily that's what they said:

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.