Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.

> Or Oracle Linux that is free and don't need's a minimal investment of 2500$ like SUSE's Liberty Linux.

Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle?

>Why would you put your business at the mercy of Oracle?

You don't, if Oracle does something fishy you go to your bank take at least 2500$ and above that 25$/y/instance and change to "Liberty" Linux ;)

CentOS stream is red hat.

Oracle also was the first to release updates last time I compared the three of them side by side, which was about a year ago. I installed Rocky, Alma and Oracle 9 on three VMs, pointed them as close to upstream repositories as possible (to avoid mirroring delays), and just started them every day to see who was the first to update. I also checked RPM metadata which includes build time. The experiment ran for (IIRC) about two months.

Oracle was consistently the first, lagging behind RHEL for a few hours (for important stuff) to a couple of days (for less important ones). Alma was a very close second. Rocky would spend days to weeks and was by far the slowest.

No, I don't buy the argument that it's good for you because they receive additional testing. If you really need that much stability that you can't take an update after RHEL has done so, introduce your own delays and test your shit on staging. I'd like my upstream to be as quick as practically possible. Oracle and Alma cover that nicely.

All this might have changed in the meantime.

Alma is based on centos stream. Centos stream is red hat.

Same reason why you put it at the mercy of RedHat. It's easier.

Oracle is a different beast[1].

If it were any other company, I might agree with you. But I just don't think I'd ever touch anything Oracle makes with a 10' pole except under duress. It's better to do the work up front of just going with the alternative than risk getting pulled into that particular tar baby.

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1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2115s

Yeah. It's super ironic. ;)

It absolutely is, kind of unreal ;)

It is and it isn't. They have a huge commercial interest in not unnecessarily sharing money with Red Hat for customers that basically need a supported/certified platform primarily for their Oracle products. SUSE has had fairly recent management changes (including ex-Red Hatters coming in). Red Hat should probably never have acquihired the CentOS team in the first place--not a comment on the people but bringing CentOS in-house with all that implied. And the others are fairly small.

In hindsight I wish I'd told KB "No, don't do it" at the meeting prior to them joining. :/

For a public forum, let's just say there was a long history of expedient decisions which I had no hand in but many of us regret :-/ Understandable but there were almost certainly better paths.

Is Oracle committed to actually supporting the distro with security updates and so on? I was under the impression that it's simply a bug-for-bug compatibility rebuild from RHEL sources, which aside from rebuilding effort, the majority of support work was still done by RH.

It's a rebuild with a few more patches on top (like ksplice). If you need a RHEL rebuild, they're the first to release security updates of any of the rebuilds I've tested. See my other comment for more info.

I wish they would add ZFS to it.

That'll only buy you several months. IIRC OL7 EOL issue in December, unless you pay for extended support while you do your work to transition to a newer OS (please, please don't rely on extended support, unless desperate, switch to new versions.)

True but gives you some additional time, and yes don't rely on ext. support, neither from RH nor Oracle. It just gets harder and harder to upgrade, as i wrote further down my preferred upgrade time-frame is 3-5 years max.