[CentOS] Blog article about the state of CentOS

Wed Jun 17 07:16:59 UTC 2020
Nicolas Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr>

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


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