Tuesday Tech Tip - Red Hat Kills Off CentOS Linux

hey everyone brett kelly here for another tuesday tech tip at 45 drives but um i guess it's less of a tech tip this week and more tech news uh pretty big news in the open source world uh some of you may be aware already and some may be learning for the first time right now red hat incentives community has well i guess in their words are shifting focus away from centos linux as a downstream rebuild of rel and moving their focus to the upstream build of centos stream and uh well put that more bluntly like what what is what does that mean well it means that they're killing off centos linux and uh well what's gonna happen next so all right so let's add a little context to what this announcement uh kind of means um there's always been three rel products well kind of as far as i've been in the game here there's been three rel products there's fedora there's rel so red hat enterprise linux and centos um fedora was always kind of the testing ground the bleeding edge new new tech out of red hat would hit fedora once it's kind of determined great ready to go it would feed itself into rel red hat enterprise linux which is their paid main product and then centos was a community rebuild of the rel product so what that meant was you got all your testing and changes done in fedora the big paid supported project from red hat rel and then centos was the rebuilt version of rel so you got a very stable solid product for free and a lot of people have benefited from that over the last few years us included at 45 drives so since this announcement what what has happened is those three products still exist but it's it's kind of more of what happened is fedora was kind of tracking so far ahead that it's not really a great testing ground for for um for rel anymore um and centos took so long to get new rebuilds of versions out you kind of had this gray area of new stuff in rel and i don't know i guess the heads up at red hat realized that that needed to change so what they're doing is they're they're killing off the downstream rebuild of centos linux and they're renaming it centos stream and it's kind of like if you can imagine it's just kind of moving ahead of rel in the in the chain right in between fedora and and uh and rel so what that means unfortunately to all of us people who have been benefiting from centos linux is that we no longer will have our fun stable fun why did i say fun our stable solid great product that is centos linux um but all hope is not lost we still have centos 7. they are supporting centos 7 until 2024. the only downside is centos e7 is a bit of an aging product it works great it's stable as all hell but it is missing some of the newer features that are coming for example one thing i'm fighting with this transition right now is ls block a command in in centos eight has a json flag now and that's not there in seven so there's all kinds of like there's a couple bumps and stuff like that but again like we still have centos linux we have that for another four years we do still have one more year of centos eight they are officially ending it december 2021 i didn't mention that but no one no one really can recommend anyone to like build an enterprise product on centos 8 linux right now because it is going away so but anyway centos 7 is still here and there's tons of other distributions a ton maybe not tons anymore but there are other distributions we can use there's ubuntu there's opensuse sues i never say those right debian um there are other great options here um uh and actually matter of fact i want to make it clear too that like they're just stopping working on building centos they're not locking the code this is still open source someone can still pull all this code down and rebuild it matter of fact how did centos start in the first place well a guy named greg who and i should have looked up his last name for his video so sorry greg but he is the original um developer who said i'm going to rebuild rel as community enterprise operating system as centos and he i believe left the project a bit ago and now he is throwing his hat back in the ring and said oh no we're starting this again and he's temporarily called this rocky linux and it's up on github if you want to check it out i think we'll put the link in the description and there's a lot of activity already of people wanting to help um so yeah like i said all hope is not lost this is a decision that has been made by red hat and and some people will people are just mad right like and rightfully so um they feel betrayed a little bit they did say they were going to support centos 8 until 2029 um they're obviously not anymore eight years sooner than they said um some people are blaming ibm ibm bot red hat a year or so ago and that they're doing this to screw all us guys over but i don't think they're doing that it's a business at the end of the day they they know they identified a hole in their product and it's their best interest to make their product as best as possible and this is what they're choosing to do so as engineers as builders like we should be excited we get to turn a new page what's that old saying sorry i'm going to butcher this it's all cheesy but like sometimes you got to knock a tree down in a forest to let the other ones grow so you see one of these giants fall like this but who knows what's going to pop up maybe it's rocky linux maybe one of the other uh canonicals ubuntu maybe open opensuse steps in and fills everyone's need here um i know i'm kind of excited i was a little like oh no this is crazy but now i'm kind of like okay great like let's get creative let's solve a new problem so um that's kind of it that that's that's it that's big news this is big news in the open source world there's a lot of people affected by this and uh and we're one of them so uh um stay tuned we'll be talking about this stuff more often and actually you know what i'm going to leave you on one funny note so so red hat is killing centos and everyone's going oh a big evil corporation getting rid of it anyway um people are asking where do i go what are my other options and like i said you've got all these other distributions but someone said no no i want to use a rel rebuild well oracle linux still offers their rail rebuild which they have a current rail8 rebuild and they've actually they've kind of put a page up saying hey all you centos users come on over here but uh if anyone knows oracle's track record on uh well i'm not gonna go into the details here but you that's a big lol all right well that's it um that's a big piece of news in the open source world and felt that uh we really wanted to take some time to share that with everyone um anyway yeah big news big ripples from this so uh you'll definitely be hearing more about this decision and it's and its ripples uh from us in the future and um well i guess that's it we'll see you guys we'll see everyone next week

Channel: 45Drives

Views: 4,713

Keywords: 45drives, storinator, stornado, storage nas, nas storage, storage server, server storage, redhat, redhat centos, oracle, network attached storage, centos

Id: GYx2bpdLUcw

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020