Top five reasons to move from CentOS to RHEL (according to Red Hat) Red Hat has given five reasons for users to move from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, though it was initially reluctant to disclose them. The company's post comes as the countdown to the end of life for CentOS 7 becomes ever more difficult for administrators to ignore. At the end of June 2024, maintenance updates for the …
Indeed, I already moved the servers to Debian(stable) some time ago. Haven't looked back and running smoothly. Next will be to move the last of an older Ubuntu install to Debian too because of their intrusive messages.
Hardest to let go of will be my Fedora machine that has gone from FC1 all the way to F38 (with hardware upgrades along the way).
Couldn't agree more!
I have been a Red Hat user, supporter and customer of Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) from about 5.x.
As a customer of RH I benefited from the large install base Centos brought, vendors providing their software in RPM, but mainly the benefits were third party repos and FAQs/howtos made largely by Centos/Alma/Rocky people.
I too have migrated my home servers all to Debian from Rocky, a bit of a pain but I got there.
I used to provide bug reports for Centos (checked on RHEL) for things I spotted at home, to make RHEL better.
But more importantly I provided early testing of Fedora in corporate environments (plus at home), in the hope that when the RHEL release came it would be more bug free in a corporate setting. I also would benefit at home by these improvements trickling down to Centos/Alma/Rocky.
Now why should I help Fedora to just be largely called a thief by Red Hat. Thanks for that...Not a nice thing to call your customers who often used Centos for prototyping before buying the real thing under RHEL. My desktops and laptops switched to an Ubuntu spin.
Red Hat you largely had a nice symbiotic relationship going with Fedora and downstream Centos. I believe a massive own goal! Short term gain at the price of the long term.
"Red Hat you largely had a nice symbiotic relationship going with Fedora and downstream Centos. I believe a massive own goal! Short term gain at the price of the long term"
Indeed, and pretty much everyone can see that this decision was only about more $$$ and not ultimately about better customer service.
For me it's not as much about Red Hat's (mis-)handling of source code access, though it seems like a silly and unnecessary own-goal to me.
More generally it's Red Hat's business and product decisions that bother me. E.g. I'm still wary of Red Hat for the way they pulled the rug out on EL8 support lifetime as a consequence of "Stream" introduction. If they're willing to renege on their own announced support commitments, then how can you really trust anything they say.
The timing of it was just awful, enough that you almost wonder if it wasn't intentional. Had they announced CentOS Stream and the corresponding CentOS 8 EOL before EL8 deployments really had a chance to get going, it might have been more understandable. Or had they simply honored the previous schedule and let the natural CentOS 8 EOL timeline play out alongside CentOS Stream instead of cutting it short, the outcry would likely have been less severe. Give the people deploying CentOS the time they'd been promised, so they can evaluate and decide their path forward, basically.
Their dubious attempts to smooth over and double-talk their way through/around those mis-steps hardly inspired trust and confidence either. And frankly, if you don't trust your vendor, or have confidence that they can help you even if they want to, then it's probably time to look elsewhere.
[Recent SUSE employee here... and Fedora user]
You did look at Liberty Linux, for those systems that need patches/support/to be compliant?
No migration needed, just an extra repo (given you don't have a hard requirement to have your own local repo, which might be supported, I'm checking internally)
Ok, I'll get my coat now </pitch>
You really think users of a free enterprise Linux distro like CentOS would be interested in moving to another pay-to-use-it Linux distro (the "liberty"in Liberty Linux clearly doesn't stand for the freedom to use and get updates without a support contract)? For a RHEL clone which like all the others will inevitably deviate from the RHEL original since RH doesn't make the sources available to non-customers?
And for those that need support, why should they give their money to SUSE (a company which is currently strangulating the free SEL clone openSUSE through the move to ALP) for their locked down RHEL clone instead of paying for enterprise support for Alma Linux (which is available for free)?
I never thought I'd say this, but even Oracle Linux is a much better proposition for CentOS users than Liberty Linux.
Maybe I've missed something, but I don't see Alma offering any support whatsoever for RHEL/CentOS 7? I haven't looked into RH's pricing but I'm pretty confident extended updates for CentOS 7 from RH will be considerably more expensive than from SuSE/Liberty...
"Maybe I've missed something, but I don't see Alma offering any support whatsoever for RHEL/CentOS 7? "
Alma is just the name of the Linux distro, Alma Linux itself is supported by three large enterprise support providers and all offer enterprise support for CentOS 7:
https://www.cybertrust.co.jp/centos/support/centos7-extend-support.html
https://tuxcare.com/extended-lifecycle-support/centos-7-extended-support/
https://www.openlogic.com/solutions/enterprise-linux-support/centos-7
Interesting, thanks. I actually didn't realise anyone was still offering updates for CentOS 6 too... Generally I use Debian or Alpine for servers but have two still on CentOS 7 which there's no other pressing reason to "upgrade" so it might well be worth a fiver a month for basic security updates for them.
Some imbeciles at IBM Red Hat believed they could squeeze CentOS users into RHEL customers by essentially crippling CentOS. The problem is that few of these organizations are going to pay for RHEL. I've used both products; and I generally only specify RHEL if formal support is needed for compliance issues or if somebody running the server is going to need that level of hand-holding (we try to avoid this, but it's not always possible). But for the most part, our in-house troubleshooting abilities exceed Red Hat's support team and it's difficult to rationalize paying for support contracts that we never use.
This has always been a significant aspect of the open source business model. Not everyone is going to pay, especially for Linux where it's not like it's an actual product of Red Hat. They do some development, they bundle things into a nice distro, and they get some paid support business. I have no problem with other business models, including freemium ones like FreePBX where I've bought a lot of add-ons and have no problem doing so. I've bought quite a bit of OpenBSD merch to support their projects like OpenSSH, and I could go on and on with examples (back to the days of registering shareware). The point isn't to talk myself up, but to explain why IBM / RedHat have lost me as a customer, forever. People like me are their "marginal customers:" the ones they risk gaining or losing. We made substantial investments based on Red Hat's very public commitments of support for CentOS. They're free to change their minds, but in doing so they harmed our investments. Therefore, they've moved from "maybe get paid" to "never get paid."
Based on comments from when this happened, I don't think I'm alone in my thinking.
With the proviso "Expect no new version/functionality upgrades, only critical and security related fixes," Oracle will provide another six months of critical RPMs.
https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/elsp-lifetime-069338.pdf
Adapting this might be as simple as adding additional yum repositories.
Login required for this link:
https://community.oracle.com/mosc/discussion/4546696/announcement-oracle-linux-7-premier-support-extended-from-jul-2024-to-dec-2024
Rocky and Alma sit precariously in this game as they attempt to chase the RHEL bits for compatibility. There are still tech support vendors that will suggest Rocky as a migration option. As an enterprise, I would stay far away from those when moving away from CentOS. Debian or another distro branch would be a safe bet if you want to get away from RHEL.
Strange logic. Without RHEL sources, Rocky, Alma and the other RHEL clones will most likely move to CentOS Stream sources, which still puts them in close proximity to the real RHEL.
So you're saying that, instead using a distro which will still be >99% the same as RHEL (which is still the #1 enterprise Linux supported by all major ISVs), people should move over to a community based Distro which is completely different and barely supported by ISVs?
It's like chopping off your arm to avoid a minor scratch.
I have been using SuSe in one flavor or the other since 2004. I gave RedHat a test run when the CentOS debacle started and they announce they would allow up to 5 machines for personal use. I installed the first machine a Dell 7920 and all was well. It was lacking robust centralize tool like Yast but that was ok, the aim was to go back to basic and learn the system rather then click click for everything.
I then attempted install on a HP Z840 the main hardware we use. The installation failed because the Z840 was not certified for 8.0 , specifically the drivers for the LSI SAS2308 Onboard controller was not available in 8.0 even though it is available in the default linux kernel.
That was the end of my experiment and back to OpenSuse I went. Any other Linux you try to install on the Z840 runs like a breeze because it is pretty vanilla hardware. I could not understand the reason RH removed support for such a commonly used controller from their install.
RedHat aggressively removes kernel code for hardware that they (somewhat arbitrarily) have decided that they will not support.
There are a few kernels that return this support, including ElRepo Mainline and the Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
It is also possible to load Fedora's kernel into RHEL, but that does have a larger blast radius.
Both of my HPE ML310e Gen8 v2 servers are now running Rocky Linux 8 after a manual migration process from CentOS 7. The deprecation of tcp_wrappers required changes to VsFTPd configs, and a switch to iptables blocking for Fail2Ban. Other than that, it was pretty painless - mostly just updates to config files to correct paths from older configs I had been too lazy to change. I am being warned on boot, that RH may deprecate the HPSSA drivers for my P222 RAID card in future releases. That is rather vague as to whether that means future kernel updates, or major release versions!? Granted, the servers are old, but that was the point with Linux - keeping older kit going. That said, there is a kmod driver from HPE, but it depends if they keep it up to date!? Their software repos are aimed at you purchasing new kit!
If Rocky eventually falls afoul of IBM's practises, I may have to switch distros, which will be a sad day, as I have been using RH-based stuff since the mid-90s. Two servers, two laptops, and a desktop are all running Rocky Linux at the moment. I suspect Ubuntu will win out as they offer their LTS version. There is little/no server-vendor support for Debian, so you cannot install the in-band management software for RAID cards, SNMP monitoring, or iLO/iDRAC integration; and these are essential and useful tools for server management.
You suck.
As someone who made a living for almost 20 years from WebSphere (MQ and Broker) as well as a long time RH Linux user, I had this uneasy feeling about RH selling out to IBM. Very much the
I've Been Mugged.
I now run a mixture of Alma and Rock Linux so have the finger from me IBM/RH.
I just don't get on with Debian and as for Ubuntu? Canonical are just a smaller IBM especially with their policy about kernel mods.
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