[Beowulf] [External] RIP CentOS 8

[Prentice Bisbal]

I think it has mostly to do with user support. The biggest innovation on 
moving from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux was the addition 
of user support. Corporations like having someone to call when something 
goes wrong. No one wants to hear "read the source" when the corporate 
mailserver is down and 5,000 employees are no longer productive.

Red Hat providing user support was actually a big deal for the Linux 
community. In the early days of Linux, many 3rd parties tried to make 
Linux acceptable to corporate users by providing Linux support services, 
but they never really caught. Probably because they weren't tied to a 
particular distro, so they weren't perceived as as "expert" as when the 
vendor itself is providing support.

On top of that, Red Hat worked with hardware and software vendors to get 
them to support their products on Red Hat. It wasn't long after RHEL was 
introduced that you started seeing hardware and software advertising 
that it was supported on RHEL.

Combine these two, and you have a recipe for success: People are more 
likely to use a version of Linux that comes with user support and that 
they know is supported by the hardware/software they use.

To this day, I rarely see hardware/software advertised/documented as 
supporting anything other than RHEL. Fortunately, many of those vendors 
would treat CentOS and Scientific Linux the same as RHEL for support 
reasons. At least that has been my experience.

Prentice

On 12/8/20 4:50 PM, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> what I never understood is: why are people not using Debian?
>
> I done some cluster installation (up to 100 or so nodes) with Debian, more or
> less out of the box, and I did not have any issue with it. I admit, I might
> have missed out something I don't know about, the famous unkown-unkowns, but
> by enlarge the clusters were running rock solid with no unusual problem.
> I did not use Lustre or GPFS etc. on it, I only played around a bit with BeeFS
> and some GlusterFS in a small scale.
>
> Just wondering, as people mentioned Ubuntu.
>
> All the best from a dark London
>
> Jörg
>
> Am Dienstag, 8. Dezember 2020, 21:12:02 GMT schrieb Christopher Samuel:
>> On 12/8/20 1:06 pm, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>>> I wouldn't be surprised if this causes Scientific Linux to come back
>>> into existence.
>> It sounds like Greg K is already talking about CentOS-NG (via the ACM
>> SIGHPC syspro Slack):
>>
>> https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gmkurtzer_centos-project-shifts-focus-to-cent
>> os-stream-activity-6742165208107761664-Ng4C
>>
>> All the best,
>> Chris
>
>
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-- 
Prentice Bisbal
Lead Software Engineer
Research Computing
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
http://www.pppl.gov