[CentOS] Just need to vent

Valeri Galtsev galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu
Sun Jan 24 18:01:32 UTC 2016


On Sun, January 24, 2016 10:45 am, Peter Duffy wrote:
> 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.

Good idea. You can set up voting site at some free place (surveymonkey
comes to my mind). And then disseminate it, say through this list.

> Maybe it's time to fork CentOS 6

This is something that will never happen. By the definition of CentOS
project (which I'm not affiliated with, but I do appreciate greatly what
they do!) it is "binary replica" of RedHat Enterprise. Any step away from
this will scare me much more than wrong (IMHO) steps of RedHat itself. I
do prefer what I use to be "enterprise-ish", that is more or less
predictable.

> 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.

Well, there is Linux distribution which is systemd-free. And that
distribution I predict will live for decently long time. It is "Devuan" -
a fork of Debian, stripped off systemd and friends... well, I should have
said: composed without systemd and friends. Devuan was forked off ebian
because of systemd. Once Ubuntu was mentioned, which is a replica of
Debian (the last _is_ systemd...), then Devuan should be pretty close to
yours Ubuntu experience. You, however, may also be tired of often reboots
(which all Linuxes in my observation suffer from: every on average 45 days
there is either kernel or glibc security update requiring reboot... no, I
do know that ksplice and similar exist, but there are few things I will
not do on servers). If that is the case you may look around and find some
UNIX system to use for some of your boxes (Open Solaris, BSD derivatives
like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PC-BSD come first to my mind). Search, try,
and something will fill the bill. Number Crunchers, clusters, even
workstations I set up for my users are still staying Linux, CentOS to be
precise, even though servers are migrated away.

I hope, this helps.

Valeri

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



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