Recently, CentOS announced some big changes to the future of CentOS.
CentOS has been my OS of choice for all linux related projects, both personally and in business environments.
Along with the initial announcements, there was somewhat a clear statement that CentOS would not be suited to run “production” environments.
What followed was a heated debate if CentOS was “DEAD” or not. And CentOS & RedHat teams had to go into full damage control.
But the damage was already done, the intentions are clear. And trying to change the discussion into a “CentOS was never a production-ready os to begin with” isn’t only wrong, but completely misses the mark.
Expecting the businesses that run CentOS in production to migrate to RedHat is.. well I don’t know how to put it but it lacks the understanding of why the business wasn’t running RHEL to begin with. And there may be multiple reasons why. Offering a “free” version of RHEL doesn’t satisfy all of the requirements/issues.
There is another problem: Support for CentOS within developers has been on the decline as well.
While I have no data to back up this statement, this is based on “personal experience” and colleagues I have spoken with agree on this.
New packages seem to be generally released with support for RHEL and Ubuntu, CentOS comes later, if at all.
Sure you can say if it works on RHEL you can…. also misses the point.
With the announced changes, I wouldn’t assume that support for CentOS will get any better for those projects that are barely supporting CentOS today.
From a personal perspective…
Before I decided to go with CentOS, I was mainly using either Slackware or FreeBSD.
I’ve tested and worked with many other distros, but those were the ones I felt at home.
I never did like Debian and for some reasons I really dis-liked suse.
For a few moments I considered to continue with CentOS Stream, but after some consideration the decision was quite easy and “obvious”, I would have to find a new linux distro.
While there are plenty of “CentOS is not dead” damage-control articles, I simply consider the uses cases and my expectations, and it’s clear that CentOS Stream isn’t what I’m looking for.
And change is inevitable.
Finding a new distro wasn’t that difficult either.
Some projects that I’ve worked with have had official support for “RHEL/CentOS & Ubuntu” with other distro’s being best-effort.
Those I talked with and were running CentOS were either migrating to RHEL or Ubuntu, depending on the environment and how much effort they wanted the migration to be.
RHEL isn’t where I wanted to go, and I don’t want to spend me time trying to make simple things work on other distro’s such as Arch Linux or similar. My main interest isn’t the OS itself but the solutions it can run.
Decison was made: I decided to invite Ubuntu into my life and start from there.
I still don’t know where this decision will lead me….