back to article Rocky has competition as more CentOS alternatives step into the ring: Project Lenix, Oracle Linux vie for attention

In the wake of Red Hat's decision to end support for CentOS Linux comes a raft of alternatives to fill the void, including Project Lenix - an offshoot of Cloud Linux - and Oracle's free Linux, which Big Red is heavily promoting. CloudLinux is a distribution based on RHEL/CentOS aimed at hosting providers and enterprises. It is …

  1. alain williams Silver badge

    What would I run away from fastest ?

    Something from Microsoft or something from Oracle ?

    I'll now go & wash my mouth out for even thinking about it!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Alien

      Re: What would I run away from fastest ?

      Oracle, definitely. Microsoft were very nasty and are still not really the good guys, but Oracle are very nasty.

      1. Soruk
        Alert

        Re: What would I run away from fastest ?

        This. It may be free now, but down the road they can introduce a feature, enabled by default and buried in the release notes state it is chargeable. Then audit you down the road. I would not like to be in that position. Also, they have form in demanding payment out of the blue for something that was once free. *cough* Java *cough* Putting that sort of liability on my employer is not something I will risk my job for.

        I have slammed the brakes on our CentOS 8 upgrade plan, and will wait things out to see what happens regarding alternatives.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Beware, the King has no clones

      I would not trust King Larry farther than I could throw his sail boat.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    "This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us"

    Which, coming from Oracle, means that yes, this is a gimmick to get you locked into Oracle Linux so that you buy support from them!

    1. gobaskof

      Re: "This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us"

      I believe them! I am sure it is far more sinister than a mere gimmick.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us"

        Knock knock

        Who's there?

        Oracle

        Oracle who?

        Oracle we would like to take your first born as per the contract you agreed to

        I know, my jokes suck - it must be the way I tell them...

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: "This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us"

      when these companies are giving their stuff away for free, how ELSE do they plan on making money from it? I would assume customization and support contracts, and nothing wrong with that, really.

      Just being honest up front can't hurt the bottom line, and may actually HELP it.

    3. oratek

      Re: "This is not some gimmick to get you running Oracle Linux so that you buy support from us"

      Absolutely as an ex-Oracle employee I can guarantee that.

  3. keithpeter Silver badge
    Pint

    Build process public?

    Will the new clones be publishing their build processes/environments?

    Icon: for all associated with RHEL, these new projects, the CentOS people including Karanbir Singh, Johnny Hughes, not forgetting TrevorH the centos forums mod, the Springdale Linux team (Josko being named by his colleagues as a key contributor) and, yes, even Oracle Linux drones and the RedHat employees who work on projects that go upstream (kernel, Gnome et al). $34 beeelion value from GPL licenced code - what is not to like?

    Posting this off a new Springdale Linux 8 install with epel (and elrepo for the iwlegacy kernel drivers) for lutz.

    For the record: tried an install of Oracle Linux. No registration needed (yum.oracle.com for boot disks) and no licence agreement. Seems too good to be true but there we are. The UEK sneaked in after an upgrade however so check your default repos.

    1. Soruk
      Facepalm

      Re: Build process public?

      Oracle is a bargepole situation. They have form for being downright evil.

      I did test their distro on an old Atom box. It installed (eventually), and booted into their Unbreakable kernel. Which caused dnf to crash with an illegal instruction after hosing the RPM database irreparably. Reinstalling and forcing the boot to use the RH-compatible kernel dnf worked.

      Hmm. Did I manage to break their unbreakable kernel?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Build process public?

        "Hmm. Did I manage to break their unbreakable kernel?"

        Possibly, do you really want to join the queue to find out?

  4. iron Silver badge

    > MySQL, available as a free community edition

    Haha. Yeah as long as you don't want the latest features or performance improvements. Last time I looked community MySQL was a major version number behind paid MySQL. We ported an app to MariaDB instead of out-of-date edition MySQL.

  5. Gene Cash Silver badge

    A company like Oracle, he added, "just does not have the trust and the stability that people have come to expect from CentOS."

    And it's so sad that it's true. Look at the steaming pile that is VirtualBox. That used to be a good product.

    1. Boothy

      Ahh yes, VirtualBox.

      Quite like the product, but they seem to keep adding new bugs, and not fixing them. Or have odd features that really shouldn't be there any more.

      For example:

      An automatic update check, that pops up a box with a link to download the latest version, except the link no longer does anything. (You can click, nothing happens). Many people reported the issue, still no fix months later after several releases. (Oddly once you do update, you get a similar prompt to say the tools have an update as well, and that mechanism works fine!).

      Create a new VM, mount an ISO with the OS installer, and for some reason it tries to boot from the empty virtual HDD disk, rather than the DVD ISO, meaning you have to select the boot menu on power up to force it to boot from the install media. (It used to automatically prioritise the DVD ISO previously). Minor issue, but still.

      Why does every new VM include a floppy drive? I've no issue with the capability being there for those that do need it, but a floppy drive really shouldn't be added by default!

      1. DJV Silver badge

        Fully agree...

        I've also reported to them that Guest Editions no longer upgrade on anything older than XP since the 6.1 upgrade. You have to uninstall them and then do a clean install EVERY time. Ticket 19875: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/19875

    2. Binraider Silver badge

      Regarding VirtualBox, there are some unfathomable decisions. Older versions had floppy-disk image swapper options; now gone. Makes running images of old program installers awkward. Considering the major use case for virtualbox is emulating old stuff that you can't do in hardware anymore this is a tad retrograde.

      I still like the program but tbh for PC emulation I have largely come full circle back to the preferring real metal to run it on, if you have to run it at all.

  6. Steve Button Silver badge

    You can trust Oracle

    They have a long track record of providing sterling support for a very reasonable price, and not squeezing their customers for every last penny.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: You can trust Oracle

      Methinks a couple of downvoters have a badly misaligned Poe's Law filter.

  7. pPPPP

    suse

    Suse would be daft not to capitalise on this. I have a feeling oracle will benefit more than anyone.

    1. Morten Bjoernsvik

      Re: suse

      Major thing with CentOS is its rpm compatibility with RedHat Enterprise. You can develop an app on CentOS and deploy to your customerbase on RedHat. (All our customers preferred Redhat)

      With containers this is not that big issue anymore since any linux guest container seem to run fine on any linux host. I havent built a standalone rpm in years, it is now all Dockerfiles and kompose in my own or company docker repos.

      Systemd startup/config scripts compatibility with redhat was nice, but now docker-compose or kubernetes kompose takes care of it. And it works out of the box on Azure/Digital Ocean once you have added the resources.

  8. karlkarl Silver badge

    There is also EulerOS!

    https://developer.huaweicloud.com/ict/en/site-euleros/euleros

    One of the very few UNIX (03) certified Linux distributions and based on CentOS rather than RHEL.

    Huawei are fairly trustworthy too! ;)

    1. Crypto Monad Silver badge

      But if it's based on CentOS, what are *they* planning to do when CentOS goes away?

      1. karlkarl Silver badge

        Same thing that Scientific Linux are going to have to do again. Repackage from RHEL as the upstream instead I suppose.

        1. Symon
          WTF?

          What are you on about? Is Scientific Linux being resurrected?

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux

          "In April 2019, it was announced that Scientific Linux would be discontinued"

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who will win the post-CentOS wars?

    I don't know this but I know for sure who will lose.

  10. Claptrap314 Silver badge

    Come into my parlor

    -- Oracle

  11. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "It seems the poll did not ask who might opt for a paid RHEL subscription"

    It would be unlikely to have got [m]any votes. The whole point of Centos was to provide an RHEL clone where support wasn't needed and/or budget wasn't available. If that condition hasn't changed then a paid sub is unlikely.

    1. KarMann Silver badge
      Devil

      They also missed asking who might actually be giving CentOS Stream a go. But then, so did The Reg, in that paragraph.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        It might have been a statistical curiosity, at least, to see how the "RHEL?" and "Stream?" questions were answered.

        But I suspect that the folks seriously considering Stream as an option, or RHEL as a paid-for alternative, probably wouldn't have been reading the article with the survey in the first place.

  12. Blackjack Silver badge

    There is only one way to solve this...

    With a cage match, winner takes it all!

  13. Andy Miller
    Joke

    I always feared...

    The takeover of Big Red by Big Blue would leave users marooned....

    1. Morten Bjoernsvik

      Re: I always feared...

      Redhat = big Red?, I always though Big Red was Oracle, or they are maybe Evil Red or Larry Red

      1. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: I always feared...

        too much analysis ruins the joke

  14. David Austin

    I know I'm the one at fault here, but I'm struggling to I'm trying to wrap my head around how this problem has manifested, and hope some of the lovely commentators here can show where my thinking is flawed;

    CentOS is basically the community edition of Red Hat; What is the issue running Red Hat without paying the IBM Tax? As Red Hat is Open Source, is there a technical barrier to making a copy without paying them? Is it just a case that Enterprises can do it, but the support is worth paying for?

    1. handleoclast

      Last time I looked (many years ago) the problem was the tool chain. After a major release, the old tool chain was no longer capable of building the new release. And to (easily) make a new tool chain that worked you needed to run it on the new release. If you wanted a hands-clean build you had to do a lot of incremental tool-chain/OS builds to get from A to B.

    2. Crypto Monad Silver badge

      As I understand it, CentOS took a lot of care to remove all RedHat branding, logos etc - all of which are copyright and not freely redistributable.

  15. SecretSonOfHG

    The fact that someone at Oracle stated ""This is not some gimmick to ...."

    Speaks volumes about Oracle's own perception of itself. Which, refreshingly, mostly matches the perception that Oracle customers have of Oracle. But to hear an Oracle employee state that they know their own company is basically evil sounds both deeply honest and deeply frightening. Does not make anyone want to become an Oracle employee certainly ("join our company and have the opportunity of behaving like scumbag surrounded by people which will admire and reward you for doing that")

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