[CentOS] Is Oracle a real alternative to Centos?

Jon Pruente

jpruente at riskanalytics.com
Tue Dec 8 18:03:25 UTC 2020


On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 11:54 AM Frank Cox <theatre at sasktel.net> wrote:

> Is Oracle a real alternative to Centos?  I'm asking because genuinely
> don't know; I've never paid any attention to Oracle's Linux offering before
> now.
>
> But today I've seen a couple of the folks here mention Oracle Linux and I
> see that Oracle even offers a script to convert Centos 7 to Oracle.
> Nothing about Centos 8 in that script, though.
>
> https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/
>
> That page seems to say that Oracle Linux is everything that Centos was
> prior to today's announcement.
>
> But someone else here just said that the first thing Oracle Linux does is
> to sign you up for an Oracle account.
>
> So, for people who know a lot more about these things than I do, what's
> the downside of using Oracle Linux versus Centos?  I assume that things
> like epel/rpmfusion/etc will work just as they do under Centos since it's
> supposed to be bit-for-bit compatible like Centos was.  What does the "sign
> up with Oracle" stuff actually do, and can you cancel, avoid, or strip it
> out if you don't want it?
>
> Based on my extremely limited knowledge around Oracle Linux, it sounds
> like that might be a go-to solution for Centos refugees.
>
> But is it, really?
>

KVM is a subscription feature. They want you to run Oracle VM Server for
x86 (which is based on Xen) so they can try to upsell you to use the Oracle
Cloud. There's other things, but that stood out immediately.

Oracle Linux FAQ (PDF):
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/027617.pdf


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