[Beowulf] HPE to acquire Cray

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Fri, 17 May 2019 10:10:16 -0400, you wrote:

>On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 10:01 AM Jonathan Aquilina
><jaquilina at eagleeyet.net> wrote:
>>
>> Redhat and IBM im worried as I use Centos big time and then the only thing I can think of is forking fedora and roll a rolling distro if they decide to pull the plug. But we have to wait and see.
>
>in regards to centos, that's another ugh moment.  i was looking to see
>when centos was going to drop v8.  to me the the one wiki page they
>put up reads like a big whine about how much work there is and people
>should stop asking.

This happens every time, people expect CentOS to ship at the same time
as RHEL and it has always been a couple of months later is my
recollection, perhaps with at least one case being longer.

While being part of Red Hat helps with some things it is still a large
amount of work, and the move to Fedora infrastructure will be causing
some new issues.

As for the Red Hat / IBM issue, time will tell I guess.  Anything
major though would likely mean a bunch of Red Hat employees suddenly
being available and so it might be worth taking a wait and see
approach.

>and intel just released a linux distro (i didn't read into it much),
>so i wonder if openhpc might move to that and drop centos.  in my view
>centos's future is uncertain, which makes me unhappy :(

Clear Linux has been around for at least a couple of years, the
biggest (and obvious) issue is that it is aimed at Intel processors
and anyone using AMD is likely to have various issues (not to mention
the unlikelyhood of having Clear Linux run on ARM or Power for those
who that matters).

And with yet another Intel security issue released this week that is
causing performance issues jumping onto an Intel focused distribution
may not be an action to take without a lot of thought.

Unless someone (with a realistic plan for the manpower and
infrastructure) forks Fedora / CentOS then realistically I suspect
that most valid althernative to Fedora / CentOS / Red Hat is Debian
(unless one really needs corporate support) given the either Ubuntu or
openSUSE also have the risk of a takeover.