[CentOS] How does such long term support work?

[Digimer]

On 30/07/13 12:39, Patrick wrote:
> I've had nothing but trouble with BSD/Linux over the past year or so.
>
> I've been on Centos 6.4 for about a half day now and I am loving it.
>
> I am just wondering though, how does a 7 year support cycle work?
>
> I see that there is libreoffice which is kinda new. Is this because open
> office is under oracle's influence?
>
> I am on gnome 2 right now, will I wake up one day in the next 7 years to
> gnome 3 ? I really don't want to. Will I just have gnome 2 + bug fixes?
>
> If so how does the community do this if the gnome people drop support
> for gnome 2.
>
> Thanks-Patrick

To expand on Mark's reply;

CentOS is a community maintained, binary compatible version of Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux. That means that, minus trademarked content, it is 
identical in every way to RHEL (warts and all). Red Hat somewhat 
recently announced that they were extending support from 7 years to 10 
years, too.

Red Hat's claim to fame, and the reason for their popularity, is that 
they maintain a super-stable OS. Once a major version is released, say 
6.0, all versions of all software will (almost) never change. So the 
version released on 6.0 will be the same version available when the last 
6.X version is retired. This means that you never have to worry about 
conflicts and faults caused by library or dependency apps changing over 
time.

As for support; Red Hat takes responsibility of maintaining *all* 
applications in their OS. Of course, most issues are resolved with help 
from the original authors, but they will take over if the original 
project dies or significantly changes for whatever reason.

CentOS, in the meantime, very quickly recompiles updates as they're 
released from Red Hat and makes them available to their users. They do 
this for all supported releases and plan to do so for the foreseeable 
future. Given their past excellent track record, I personally have every 
reason to trust them. So CentOS will continue to provide support for 
CentOS 5 until 2017 and CentOS 6 until 2020.

This is why RHEL and CentOS are so extremely popular in enterprise. It's 
arguably the most supported and longest living release cycle in the 
Linux ecosystem.

hth

-- 
Digimer
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