[CentOS] Blog article about the state of CentOS

Wed Jun 17 14:19:07 UTC 2020
Leon Fauster <leonfauster at googlemail.com>

Am 17.06.20 um 09:16 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:
> 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.
> 


Site note: Despite the implications of update delays. The numbers 
provided by Michael are not comparable. The needed effort between every 
major release to build the OS is different. So, the numbers should be 
normalized.

Quote from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8:

"The differences ... has changed drastically, the repository format has
added 'modules' and RPMS have grown many features that EL7 and before do
not have."

I wonder about the authors conclusion; the fact that RHEL is the choice
for critical applications (what ever critical is) is known since the 
early days. This applies randomly to C5.11, C4.9 or C8.2.2004.

So - cold soup get cooked again :-)

--
Leon