Going way back when CentOS 7 was first released, I found it difficult to migrate from 6 to 7. For example, the management of IPTables for myself was quite simple (editing a single file) and changing the way things are managed with FirewallD at the time was challenging. Over time, you adapt and learn the new systems. There still are a lot of systems that use CentOS 7 and in the process of migrating to 8, however that may now not occur.

The biggest thing that threw me off with CentOS 8 was RHEL's decision to cease native support for the SAS2008 drivers. There is still a lot of hardware in production that uses the SAS2008 chipset, and it is somewhat difficult to slipstream drivers into the installer in order to use CentOS 8 on systems with drives and cards that use SAS2008. It was quite painful for myself who had to build 64 x Dell M610 blades manually which still used storage controllers with the SAS2008 chipset.

It is a major mistake for CentOS/RHEL to cease support for CentOS 8 so early. The global IT community will take a big hit. There are going to be countless individuals, organisations, companies, schools, etc. who will scramble to migrate to platforms that are so strongly supported (*looking at Ubuntu*) and there are going to be a lot of annoyed and pissed-off devs who have been busy working to rebuild their software to ensure compatibility with CentOS 8 only to learn that the OS will no longer be supported. CentOS/RHEL should now consider CentOS 8 dead as no one will bother spending the time or effort to develop software for a system that will be obsolete in just over 12 months.

From: CentOS-mirror <centos-mirror-bounces@centos.org> on behalf of Christian Freund <freund@wrz.de>
Sent: Thursday, 10 December 2020 2:12 AM
To: Mailing list for CentOS mirrors. <centos-mirror@centos.org>
Subject: Re: [CentOS-mirror] Removal of mirror.alpha-labs.net

>> as CentOS is now a complete and utter piece of garbage
>>
>> I am no longer willing to give then any of my resources.
>> Please remove mirror.alpha-labs.net from any and all servers.
> Hi Christian,
> I can understand frustration and so why you reacted like you did.
> My only message would be actually : "Don't shoot the messenger [TM]" ... :/
> Let me just (if you permit it) slightly disagree with your "CentOS is now a complete and utter piece of garbage" : CentOS Linux itself hasn't changed and will remain so still need a mirror network, etc .. But probably not worth discussing on the list as myself I'd like to wait some days to publicly say what I think of all this.
>Anyway, let me thank you for having been part of the wide CentOS mirror network in the last years, as you helped people using CentOS
> I've removed your mirror from our crawler DB and so shouldn't be "crawled/validated" anymore
>Kind Regards,
>Fabian Arrotin

Hello Fabian and Christian, hello List,

I do not think that CentOS is garbage now, but it is going to be unusable for (pre)production very soon.

>From my point it is annoying that we now have to downgrade to 7 after going from 6 to 8. For people parallely using RHEL this is the moment where you pay really a lot of money to Redhat or kick out RHEL and CentOS completely in your long-term-plans for a time beyond 2021.

We are not taking our mirror down (yet). But there is no reason to keep it up longer than needed for a project that lost its significance.

I am "not amused" that CentOS stops to be what it once was: "A Cent for an enterprise community OS that is widely used".

Best Regards
Christian Freund
_______________________________________________
CentOS-mirror mailing list
CentOS-mirror@centos.org
https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-mirror