Re: [bitfolk] Where do current CentOS users want to go after CentOS 8 EOL?

Hello Hugh, November 2, 2021 9:42 PM, "Hugh via users" <users(a)lists.bitfolk.com> wrote: It's still early days, but it seems that there are a few choices available. Firstly as Andy suggested in another post, MariaDB offers a CentOS/RHEL7 YUM repository for version 10 that you should be able to configure. I use it for a few personal projects, so that attests to it being easy enough to get going. :-) Here is the official info on it: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/yum/ Regarding the future of those of us who upgraded to CentOS 8, and now sit with a few tough choices to make... At my "/dev/wrk" we use CentOS 6/7 extensively for our legacy products, so the RH double-down on CentOS 8 came as a major shake-up for us. Thankfully we were not majorly invested into CentOS 8 specifically, although we were quite a ways along an upgrade project where we leapfrogged CentOS 7 from 6 (yep, we are still using 6 a lot, that's the "Enterprise Way" as dodgy as it sounds). Needless to say, this project came to a screeching halt, and we have now diverted our future development away from running our SaaS products on full-fat VMs, over to running them in containers (current flavour-of-the-day being Kubernetes). Hopefully this will mean that we are a tad more agile in future in absorbing such major changes to the landscape - we were caught out good and proper! :-) TL;DR ----- CentOS Stream: If you don't mind moving from "boringly stable" to "a little bit edgy", I would go for CentOS Stream. I upgraded a few CentOS 8 boxes to Stream in order to test the cross-grade methods, and it all works fine. At the moment Stream is by and large still based on CentOS 8, so you won't find any binary-compatibility issues. And if you stick to stuff in the official repositories, it is also highly unlikely you will find major issues in future. Rocky Linux: I like Rocky. I'm not 100% sure whether it will last, but it has garnered quite a bit of support in the wider industry in the form of sponsorship from AWS, MS Azure and Google. This makes me confident that it won't be going away soon. It's also governed by a foundation (a little bit like Debian) rather than a corporate entity, which gives me warm fuzzies for the future of Rocky. I might be wrong, but at the moment it looks good to me. Alma Linux: Very similar story to Rocky, and it works well. The major difference is the governing model - Alma is supported by CloudLinux, a corporate entity. CloudLinux has been around since 2009, an indications are that they are a healthy organisation. Therefore Alma Linux seems to be there for at least the medium term. Oracle Linux: 'Nuff said. It's there, it's based on CentOS 8 at the moment, Oracle won't be going anywhere soon. I won't be using it any time soon, but it certainly looks like a solid alternative on paper. :-/ My take - in situations where stability is not my primary concern, I would be tempted to go with Stream - the fact that it's a rolling release is certainly tempting. In situations where stability is key, I would use Rocky because I like its governing model better than the alternatives (the less corporate shenanigans the better IMHO). Cheers, Jan