[CentOS] Just need to vent

Sun Jan 24 16:45:20 UTC 2016
Peter Duffy <peter at pwduffy.org.uk>

On Sat, 2016-01-23 at 20:27 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Jan 2016 20:05:02 -0500
> Mark LaPierre wrote:
> 
> > The main reason I'm still using, nearly obsolete, CentOS 6 is because I
> > don't want to have to deal with Gnome 3.
> 
> Install Mate on Centos 7 and you never have to touch Gnome 3.  I did,
> and my desktops don't look or work any different today than they did
> under Centos 6.
> 

Trouble is that when you go from 6 to 7, you also have the delights of
systemd and grub 2 to contend with.

I'm also still using CentOS 6, and currently have no desire to
"upgrade". I'm still in shock after trying to upgrade to Red Hat 7 at
work, and after the upgrade (apart from being faced with the gnome3
craziness) finding that many of the admin commands either didn't work,
or only worked partially via a wrapper. (And the added insult that when
I shut down the box, it gave a message something like: "shutdown status
asserted" and then hung, so that it had to be power-cycled. Then when it
came back up, it went through all the fs checks as though it had shut
down ungracefully.) I allowed some of the senior developers to try the
box themselves for a while, and based on their findings, it was decided
to switch to Ubuntu (which (at least then) didn't use systemd,) together
with Mate and XFCE.

Similarly with others who have commented, I simply cannot understand why
the maintainers of crucial components in linux have this thing about
making vast changes which impact (usually adversely) on users and
admins, without (apparently) any general discussion or review of the
proposed changes. What happened to RFCs? Maybe it's a power thing - we
can do it, so we're gonna do it, and if ya don't like it, tough!

It would be very interesting to know how many other users are still on
CentOS/Red Hat 6 as a result of reluctance to enjoy all the - erm -
improvements in 7. Maybe it's time to fork CentOS 6 and make it look and
behave like 7 without systemd (or even better, with some way of
selecting the init methodology at install-time and afterwards), and with
gnome2 (or a clear choice between 2 and 3). Call it DeCentOS.