The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
Same story as an Ubuntu user. Actually, doesn't everyone go to the Arch wiki? :D
(Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
In fairness, that's kind of the point of CentOS et al.
It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important.
> It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support.
I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST.
Just stop talking.
Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release.
Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand.
But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.
CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”.
I wish Rocky Linux the same success!
I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it.
Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset.
But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
There's no question about that, but I just don't equate a large install base with being successful. Had CentOS been successful, there would have been no Redhat involvement. CentOS failed the day Redhat took control of the project. After that it was just an version of RHEL without the subscription.
Companies wanted RHEL, but not pay for the development and maintenance. If this changes, and more companies are will to either donate to pay developers, or hire Rocky Linux develops, then maybe it will be successful. If it's just a few people slaving away in their free time, trying to maintain a parallel RHEL build, then I kinda doubt it's longevity.
It's not the I just want something for nothing. I'll pay for good tools, but my time is money too and if I feel myself going down a high-touch sales process with stuff that feels like lock-in and DRM, I'm gonna check out and go for an alternative pretty quick. I used CentOS all the time because I was in the position of trying to support people running my software on Red Hat. And I never had to worry about talking to a sales person, or making sure my keys for the repository were everywhere they needed to be. I would have still used it, even if I had to enter my personal credit card to get an official ISO. Even once my company had a proper agreement and partnership with Red Hat, it was still a pain for me to get a system up and running without talking to IT, etc.
Red Hat seems to have lighter-weight licensing for such use cases now, so we'll see. But at this point I've already switched over to Ubuntu and I doubt Red Hat or Red Hat clones will ever fully recover to their former glory.
CentOS 3, 4, 5, 6 and now 7 have all fulfilled their mission to be bit-clones of RHEL since 2004. As a CentOS user of every single one of them, they were a success and satisfied the needs of the community for 17 years. The first version of Ubuntu was released 6 months after CentOS 3.
The approach to "long term stability" has not changed whatsoever. The only difference is whether the updates are delivered as point-release bundles every 6 months, or incrementally. And it's supported for 5 years instead of 10, which is in-line with other free LTS distros.
It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.