My only problem with CentOS is that it is "outdated." A few times this was annoying because I had hit a bug that was fixed in newer versions. I understand that outdated is a feature of CentOS, but it comes with a trade off.

I switched my servers to Ubuntu for now.

There is https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Softwa... but we didn't use it. Not sure how successful others are with it.

But yeah it was a major pain. Remember all the time wasted getting things to work or compile on outdated kernels or standard library...

Thats not true compared to ubuntu. while centos 7 included java8, ubuntu 14.04 did not, both released on 2014. And on CentOS 6 I'm not sure but I think EPEL (which is way more official than any ubutnu PPA) has openjdk 8 for centos 6. there is some software that is maybe "old" but not "outdated" on centos, however as far as I know most software runs on centos, really good. The only thing which has bad support on CentOS at the moment is openssl 1.0.2 and newer nginx/haproxy.

In general EPEL should never override packages from the base system. Other repos do that but EPEL's mission is to provide extra package not newer packages.

Otherwise it creates a mess. Someone adds EPEL, updates, now their software which was based of a base package is broken because EPEL upgraded libc or something like that.

How is it not true? CentOS is still at version 7 with a 3.x kernel, while Ubuntu is now at version 16.04 with a 4.x kernel. Many os-level packages are not going to get updated until a new major version of RHEL comes out.

Why are you mentioning 7 and 16.04? Those numbers mean nothing when you compare different distributions.

I am not comparing the numbers in a mathematical way (I am not saying 16 is better than 7). I meant more like that packages get updates to next major versions when the OS jumps to the next major version. Somehow, I felt that Ubuntu releases new major versions more often than RHEL. But checking the release dates it seems that I was wrong.

Actually 7 is released on 2012 while 16.04 is released on 2016. You could compare 14.04 and 7 but not 16.04 and 7. Eventually you could compare CentOS 8 when it comes out this year.

No, RHEL 7 was released in June 2014, not 2012. There's no sign of RHEL 8 yet either; it would be quite surprising for it to come out this year.

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078

> Actually 7 is released on 2012 while 16.04 is released on 2016.

Observe that that was chrisper's original very point.

Those are the current versions of each. The comparison is between the kernel versions, not the distro version numbers.

Even the kernel version isn't particularly helpful, as Red Hat is backporting new features into the version shipped by RHEL 6 and 7.

One specific example is the SO_REUSEPORT socket option which was added to Linux kernel 3.9, and was subsequently backported and became available since RHEL 6.5, which uses version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Kerne...

"still at version 7" strongly implies a comparison of the distro version numbers.

No, it does not. It implies that one has been at a particular level for some time, whilst the other has only reached its current level recently. chrisper was very clearly not comparing the release numbers, as xe said. One only need read xyr prior comment in this very same thread where xe was talking about outdatedness of what is currently available.

Which reminds me of 1999 when Slackware jumped from version 4 to 7, purely to keep up with competition.

I think, at least for RHEL, that is a feature.

And Debian stable, see JWZs ranting on that regarding xscreensaver...

You could always run Fedora Cloud: https://getfedora.org/en/cloud/

But you're back in the world of not having all those certifications which enterprise customers may want. On the other hand it shares common package infrastructure with RHEL so that's a bonus.

We used Fedora Cloud for a bit and I liked it. Be prepared for cutting-edge though, for example, journalctld rather than syslog.

We switch to Ubuntu for reasons not related to Fedora in particular but just ease of running an Apt repository on S3 vs Yum/Dnf.

Cutting edge is terrible for running a business on though.

This is a good point. At Userify, we support RHEL7+ (also CentOS), Ubuntu 14.04LTS, and Debian Jessie for the on-site server product (we support a broader range of managed nodes). It's a good point that about 2/3's of our customers use either RHEL7 or CentOS, but we do have customers running on Ubuntu (for instance) in both HIPAA and PCI environments.

(We also provide cloud-based SSH key management at no charge with upgrades available, but mostly our customers there are startups, although we do have a couple of public companies on our cloud SaaS platform. Since our revenue is largely driven by enterprises and mid-sized companies that want to run their own in-house and/or in their own clouds, we'll try to accommodate any OS they prefer: normally, that's RHEL, but increasingly Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and CentOS.)

Thanks - this is very informative, and from my previous experience at VMW I can confirm this is absolutely right. p.s. Is there a way to know who you are? Cannot recongnize your username and I would be interested in knowing who you are and if we can get in touch.

Never mind that the chairman of the RH board is a retired general...

It's how you get contracts. You pay them then they really pay you. Watchdog groups call it The Revolving Door.

Or lobbying. Or graft/bribery.

I suppose it depends on whether you are in the private sector, the public sector, or law enforcement.

Pro tip: do everyone available for best results. ;)

Shuttleworth inquired with you personally?

It was an open request to the community from his blog post. I emailed him first, that's how conversation started.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/?s=government

How does FreeBSD stack up?

In the same category as Ubuntu. There are some things you can do and market your product as an "embedded" device, if it truly is so, but that is a bit tricky. And of course, can get exceptions, that's tricky too, and doesn't scale.