CentOS Stream^W^W Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 emerges in beta form

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 …

[Korev]

A pint for "We're on a highway to RHEL" -->

[Roger Kynaston]

Although I am thoroughtly disenchanged with RH this is OKish

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

[Clausewitz 4.0]

Re: Although I am thoroughtly disenchanged with RH this is OKish

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Although I am thoroughtly disenchanged with RH this is OKish

Seeing as Red Hat is one of the main developers behind systemd, I wouldn’t hold my breathe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Although I am thoroughtly disenchanged with RH this is OKish

I think you mean Leinart Poettering... Don't worry, I'm sure his next project will make PulseAudio and SystemD look like childs play. Or do I have that backwards.

[JacobZ]

RHEL 8 was the Windows Vista of Linux distros. Even the upgrade paths from various minors of RHEL 7 was a PITA.

Let's hope RHEL 9 migration is smoother.

[Anonymous Coward]

Upgrading from one major RHEL to another is almost always either impossible or not for the faint of heart. It’s almost always a reinstall. :(

Sure, they somewhat support it, but I wouldn’t trust it.

As far as being Vista, if that’s true, then 7 was ME.

[rcxb1]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does bash completion work for “dnf install”?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why (honest question) are you not using 'yum localinstall nnn.rpm' ?

[rcxb1]

Whether you use dnf or yum, and install or localinstall args, RHEL8 has a long pause (searching the repo) every time you hit TAB. The bash_completion is VERY stupid.

[Santa from Exeter]

Elephant in the room

For me, the elephant in the room with RHEL9 is the insistence on using Network Manager to manage interfaces.

Tho 'old' network scripts will no longer work, which will mean a major headache for us, as we use Puppet extensively to manage interfaces/ bonding etc.

[AdamWill]

Re: Elephant in the room

NetworkManager can be controlled by an automation framework just fine. Ansible does it perfectly well. I don't use puppet, but there's no reason it can't also.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Elephant in the room

Agreed 100%. I have an excellent role for ifcfg files and it'll be painful to change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Already migrated to Rocky and it's working just fine.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't suppose this will not be very popular

but I do wish I.B.M. had not bought Red Hat. They should have left well alone and, maybe, put the money to "doing up" OS2. And this time, put some effort into selling it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I don't suppose this will not be very popular

I think their idea was to acquire a business unit which had some prospect of making some money.

Let's just hope they don't **** it up too much. After the CentOS Fiasco, I won't be holding my breath though.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: I don't suppose this will not be very popular

OS/2 updated...

https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos/

[Blackjack]

With even Red Hat itself getting a budget cut, is time to move on to something else.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/05/red_hat_jobs/

[amacater]

RHEL 9

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).