
A pint for "We're on a highway to RHEL" -->
IBM tentacle Red Hat on Wednesday unveiled the beta for version nine of its eponymous Enterprise Linux product, now built from CentOS Stream. This version is due for official release in 2022. Its predecessor debuted in 2019, the year IBM closed the deal to acquire the Linux distro, and it right now stands at version 8.4, which …
RHEL 7 brought the shitshow called systemd. RHEL8 brought a welcome integration of containers and such like but a lot of changes. Now, at least the update will be less dramatic for a while. That said, I doubt we will rush to adopt this as we are still getting used to having RHEL8.
The Centos thing was truly stupid though and I may wind up looking at other Debian based distros
I see a lot of folks, who, like me, hates systemd so much to the point of going to great lengths to even put BSDs in production places where Linux would sit just fine.
Luckly some distros are starting to offer "/systemd-free/" flavours. Hope it gets into RHEL.
No, it's RHEL6 that was either Vista or Win8. That's when they switched their init system to Upstart, only to drop it for systemd in RHEL7. They also decided to enable "consistent network device naming" in a MINOR VERSION update, so everybody's "eth0" devices changed to "enp2s0" or some such, breaking everyone's networking on reboot after upgrading. You would have done well to skip CentOS6.
I have various issues with RHEL8, like the overbearing bash completion (e.g. can't "yum install" local RPMs), excessive colourization aliases, and aggressive removal of older hardware. But RHEL8 is mostly fine, and an improvement over RHEL7 (where RHEL for example decided disabling the --user option to systemctl was a great idea)... More modern software works on it, it supports newer hardware, and is plenty stable.
If you like Cockpit - nice sysadmin through the Web - it'll be lovely. If you like minimal change it'll be fine for the next five years - but RHEL 10 will be here in 2024 just as RHEL7 dies ...
If you want to do up to date software - meh, as always. If you've users who want to do stuff that isn't in core RHEL and demands third party repositories -- well, at least in RHEL 9 they will have sorted out some of the modules hell.
I've said it for a long time: support is a movable feast. Rather than migrate to "one of the Debian-based distros" - just use Debian (unless your bean counters want large scale support in which case pay for Ubuntu, maybe).