Some of us are forced by edict/policy to RHEL-only. I'm doing work for a client whose IT dept requires it, because it's all they 'support'.
Their 'support' largely consists of
a) giving ridiculously small and unchangeable /home and /usr partition sizes,
b) randomly logging in at unannounced times to add more logging and monitoring tools in to /home and /usr (then rebooting, also unannounced),
c) sending sporadic emails telling us to clean up our system because we are dangerously low on drive space in /home and /usr.
Got a message the other day stating that they power down our machine in 2 days unless we freed up drive space because 'low drive space can impact system availability and security'. Powering it down also impacts availability, but that point seemed lost on them.
EDIT: Realizing now that ... our RHEL 7 will expire at end of month. We've had 0 communication from them about this. Annoyed because when I'd requested this machine back in 2021, asking for RHEL 8, I was told "we don't officially support that", and now we're going in to EOL territory because of RHEL 7. I'm expecting an "hair on fire" email in early July indicating our machines will be shut down shortly without an immediate upgrade, that we will be forced to do ourselves (because upgrades fall outside 'support').
if you are going to stay, don't update to 8. Update to 9. Any 'significant' fixes you need fixed for 8 wont be possible in this stage of life and only 9 fits that requirement.
Debian was always there, they deserve what they get.
I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.
But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.
There are a lot of HPC sysadmins that are very busy lately. A lot of third party software started dropping CentOS 7 support this year, and they never upgraded their clusters to 8/9.
As the IBM constructorships’ beams cut up this ecosystem you kind of see why the head Vogon has no sympathy because the plans have not been “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’”
Personally, I found RPM distros to be quite stable but have largely moved over to Ubuntu LTS for servers (technically Debian also has a LTS release, but it’s not as mainstream) and Linux Mint locally (largely Ubuntu without focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is pleasant), it’s been working pretty well so far.
Then again, I run most software in Docker containers, so thankfully underlying OS changes usually aren’t too bad for me to deal with.
Debian 12, after a period of using Ubuntu that ended when Canonical decided to put advertising in the friggin cli. Oh, and pushing snap, but the advertising is what really nailed it for me. ;)
Switched to Debian since one of services we use is Debian supported only so it was a logical choice. Some clients are still requesting Oracle or RHEL but we are pushing towards Debian. It was a nice ride with CentOS.
There are a ton of perfectly good Linux distros out there--many with some type of support available. The thing with CentOS was that, especially latterly after the CentOS team was acquired by Red Hat, many saw CentOS--as a downstream rebuild from RHEL sources, albeit with a different build system--as a semi-supported version of RHEL for free.
For people who don't want CentOS Stream, i.e. basically the nightly RHEL builds, the lack of having a versioned CentOS mirroring RHEL versions coming out of Red Hat (for about the last 10 years) puts them in somewhat uncharted waters even if they could pick one of the RHEL alternatives and "probably" be fine.
jacobyoder|1 year ago
Their 'support' largely consists of
a) giving ridiculously small and unchangeable /home and /usr partition sizes,
b) randomly logging in at unannounced times to add more logging and monitoring tools in to /home and /usr (then rebooting, also unannounced),
c) sending sporadic emails telling us to clean up our system because we are dangerously low on drive space in /home and /usr.
Got a message the other day stating that they power down our machine in 2 days unless we freed up drive space because 'low drive space can impact system availability and security'. Powering it down also impacts availability, but that point seemed lost on them.
EDIT: Realizing now that ... our RHEL 7 will expire at end of month. We've had 0 communication from them about this. Annoyed because when I'd requested this machine back in 2021, asking for RHEL 8, I was told "we don't officially support that", and now we're going in to EOL territory because of RHEL 7. I'm expecting an "hair on fire" email in early July indicating our machines will be shut down shortly without an immediate upgrade, that we will be forced to do ourselves (because upgrades fall outside 'support').
lenerdenator|1 year ago
worthless-trash|1 year ago
bayindirh|1 year ago
A change like this for thousands of bare metal machines, is not inconsequential. The complete inverse is true, in fact.
llm_trw|1 year ago
I'm saying this as someone who fought tooth and nail to migrate to Debian instead of Scientific in 2010 because you can't ever trust a for profit company.
But that was too hard, and what would a grad student know about the real world anyway, so here we are.
bluedino|1 year ago
Containers have been a big help.
adolph|1 year ago
major505|1 year ago
KronisLV|1 year ago
Aside from that, Rocky Linux also seems like a great choice for many: https://rockylinux.org/
Some also say that AlmaLinux is pretty good: https://almalinux.org/
Personally, I found RPM distros to be quite stable but have largely moved over to Ubuntu LTS for servers (technically Debian also has a LTS release, but it’s not as mainstream) and Linux Mint locally (largely Ubuntu without focus on snaps and the Cinnamon desktop is pleasant), it’s been working pretty well so far.
Then again, I run most software in Docker containers, so thankfully underlying OS changes usually aren’t too bad for me to deal with.
justinclift|1 year ago
RedShift1|1 year ago
Timber-6539|1 year ago
creshal|1 year ago
fx1994|1 year ago
e1g|1 year ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|1 year ago
ghaff|1 year ago
For people who don't want CentOS Stream, i.e. basically the nightly RHEL builds, the lack of having a versioned CentOS mirroring RHEL versions coming out of Red Hat (for about the last 10 years) puts them in somewhat uncharted waters even if they could pick one of the RHEL alternatives and "probably" be fine.
EasyMark|1 year ago