Entering edit mode
3.4 years ago
5heikki
11k
Maybe some of you already heard the news? CentOS 8 will be EOL'd in 2021. CentOS 7 will be supported until 2024. The rolling release, CentOS Stream, which is upstream of RHEL, will be the only CentOS. I'm glad that I haven't had the time to move any of the servers I administer to CentOS 8 yet. However, I'm getting a new PowerEdge in a couple of weeks and now I'm not sure what to do. Ubuntu LTS or CentOS Stream? What distros are you guys using? Few times that CentOS ever got in the way of my work. This is why it has been my distro of choice for Bioinformatics desktops/servers..
Sounds like you don't want to pay? Otherwise RHEL. Ubuntu LTS may be safe option since most people seem to develop for it.
As I understand it this is not so big a change. Instead of CentOS following RHEL, it will precede it, i.e. it will be like the "unstable" version of RHEL or the pre-release version of the next RHEL version. An alternative could be Debian stable if you don't mind even older versions of libraries than what CentOS offers. Or if you want to stay with the CentOS ecosystem, go with Fedora if you don't mind the more frequent release cycle. The Debian equivalent of Fedora would be Ubuntu. If you go with Ubuntu, avoid snap packages. For desktop I use Ubuntu but CentOS for servers. I am still on CentOS 7 so I'll wait and see what happens.
We're running a ca 1000 core SLURM cluster on Ubuntu. The LTS are very good, docs are great. There's another cluster here running on RHEL but that's from IT. We had a look at Debian but far less docs, and even essential programs like ls can be subtly different.
5heikki and Jean-Karim Heriche : I just read that
How this would impact systems at an institution level may decide if you can partake in this program.
Thanks for the heads up. It doesn't look like a viable option to replace CentOS at scale like on a whole cluster or for a fleet of VMs.
Its license has to be renewed annually. They could cancel that policy at any time. I already installed Ubuntu LTS 20.04 on my new PowerEdge. I have one server on CentOS 7. I still have many years time to decide what to do with it. I imagine by 2024 a viable CentOS alternative (most likely Rocky Linux) will be available..