Il 17/06/20 09:16, Nicolas Kovacs ha scritto: > Hi, > > I just read this blog article from austrian Linux expert Michael Kofler. For > those among you who don't know the guy, he's my home country's number one Linux > expert (known as "der Kofler") and most notably the author of a series of > excellent books about Linux over the last 25 years. > > https://kofler.info/centos-8-wertlose-langzeitunterstuetzung/ > > Disclaimer : I've been a CentOS user (and fan) since 4.x, I'm using it on all > my servers, and yes, I know the difference between upstream RHEL and CentOS. > > The article is in german, but the statistics graph is eloquent enough for the > non-german-speaking users. It focuses on updates for CentOS 8, and more exactly > the extended periods of time where there have been no updates available. > > The author's theory ("unspoken truth"): while it's a positive thing that Red > Hat is sponsoring CentOS, the amount of sponsoring is just insufficient enough > so that the product is "starved to death" by Red Hat (e. g. IBM) to encourage > users to move to RHEL. > > The author's conclusion is quite severe: in the current state of things, CentOS > 8 is not recommendable for production as updates are lagging too much behind. > While CentOS 7 may be usable, CentOS 8 has been "degraded to teaching and > testing purposes". > > Still according to Mister Kofler, this "sorry state of things" will probably > encourage users to move to Oracle Linux, the other big RHEL clone. > > After some hesitation, I decided to share this on the mailing list. Since this > raises some concerns, I'd be curious to have your take on this. > > Cheers from the sunny South of France, > > Niki Hi Niki, this is a sad thing but I'm not surprised by this and this is what I'm thinking about CentOS since 8 was released. The CentOS team does a huge work to release CentOS8, CentOS Stream and maintaining 7 and 6. Thank you so much for this CentOS Team. But since the core team is composed by 6(?) member is obvious that they can't maintain all this versions without being in late and because it is supported (but maybe supported is the wrong word in the current case) by RH, if RH really interest about CentOS release they should put more effort on CentOS Development. This is not what is happening and since 8 is released, it seems a try and buy distro. I walked through 6.5 to 7 and 8. In 6.5 I was new, in 7 I really appreciated CentOS but with 8 I noticed that it is not supported like CentOS 7. I use (like you) centos on all my server, some are anchored to the old stable and other on 8 (but not production). I liked it very much that I use it also on my workstation. About update blackout, this is a great problem for production system faced on Internet. SELinux can mitigate the risk (but also selinux got security fix) but this is always an issue. Many report that the gap between RHEL release and CentOS release is too much but I'm not interested in how much time centos releases get through the build process but I'm interested that, when a new centos release (major/minor) are on the way, all others releases (current stable inside) will get security updates during the build process and not left alone. Another minor issue about updates are relative announces on ml that works for C7 but not for C8 (I read in a reddit AMA why this happens). This is annoying because I need to follow every RHBA to see what happened and why a package is updated or blindly install updates. This is another thing that is not so good for a server. If the theory "unspoken truth" is real I don't like how RH is trying to encourage me to switch to RHEL and this is a bad way to do this. About Oracle as alternative. Oracle Linux is not an alternative to CentOS but for RHEL and if I will force to pay for enteprise system currently I will pay RHEL, not OL. Over this, OL is not the only enterprise distro that a "user" could choose. If support is needed there are SUSE (SLES) and Ubuntu. For who that don't need support there are Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (I'm talking about the most used but you know that slackware,FreeBSD are in that list), so many alternatives are in place. I hope that things will be better but in case of "failure" I will evaluate other alternatives to CentOS for this "sorry state of things". Thank you for sharing, I found it interesting. My 2 Cent