 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 897, 21 December 2020 |
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Welcome to this year's 51st issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Last week we shared news about the CentOS project phasing out support for CentOS Linux. While the CentOS team will continue to work on CentOS Stream, its developmental nature is not as appealing to many CentOS users as the enterprise grade CentOS Linux edition. This has resulted in a lot of CentOS administrators seeking alternative, stable platforms. In our Questions and Answers section we discuss a number of options for former CentOS Linux users. Are you a CentOS Linux user looking for a replacement? Let us know in our Opinion Poll what you plan to install when CentOS is no longer supported. A few companies are already promoting their alternatives to CentOS with openSUSE and CloudLinux trying to attract people looking for long-term support, stable platforms. We talk about these promotions in our News section along with some updates from the Tails project about their fundraising efforts and release cycle changes. First through we take a look at a rolling release platform called Archman GNU/Linux. The Archman project provides a desktop-oriented operating system based on Arch Linux which features a friendly installer. Read on to learn how Archman performs. Plus we are pleased to share the releases of the past week and list the torrents we are seeding. We will be off on holiday next Monday, but will return on January 4th, 2021. We wish you all a wonderful conclusion to the year, a great holiday season, and happy reading!
Content:
- Review: Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 "KDE"
- News: openSUSE and CloudLinux promote their CentOS alternatives, Tails talks about their adjusted release cycle
- Questions and answers: What to do in the wake of Red Hat phasing out CentOS
- Released last week: NuTyX 20.12.0, UBports 16.04 OTA-15, Q4OS 3.13
- Torrent corner: Alpine, batocera, Bluestar, KDE neon, Kwort, NuTyX, Q4OS, Tails, Ultimate Edition, Volumio
- Opinion poll: Where will you go now that CentOS Linux is being discontinued?
- Reader comments
Listen to the Podcast edition of this week's DistroWatch Weekly in OGG (14MB) and MP3 (11MB) formats.
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 "KDE"
Archman GNU/Linux is an Arch Linux-based distribution which features the Calamares system installer and a pre-configured desktop environment. The distribution offers a rolling release approach. This means each new ISO release is a snapshot of the distribution rather than a planned fixed release. One thing I find interesting about Archman is each snapshot seems to offer different desktops editions. The 2020-11 folder on their download mirror provides KDE and i3 flavours of the distribution. The 2020-10 snapshot has just Xfce as its sole option. The 2020-08 folder on the server offers Deepin while 2020-07 is available in Xfce and MATE editions. Most editions appear to be around 2GB in size, with a few hundred megabytes added or removed, depending on which desktop environment is bundled on the media. I downloaded the KDE Plasma edition of the latest snapshot which was 2.2GB.
Live media
I tried booting from the live media in both UEFI mode and Legacy BIOS mode. The Legacy BIOS mode worked as expected, but I ran into an issue when running my machine in UEFI mode. The system would appear to begin its boot process and then quickly drop to an UEFI Shell prompt. I tried restarting in UEFI mode a few times until I realized what was happening was the Archman media was being read and a boot menu was being displayed very briefly where the default option was to drop to the shell prompt. There is a menu option to boot Archman into live mode instead, but it requires catching the boot menu very quickly. If I blinked it would zip by and I'd be dropped to the UEFI Shell again.
The boot menu for either mode allows us to run the live desktop media with either free video drivers or non-free NVIDIA drivers. The distribution then loads and presents us with the KDE Plasma desktop running on the X.Org display server. There is a thick panel displayed across the bottom of the desktop. This panel houses the application menu, some quick-launch buttons, the task switcher, and the system tray. There are no icons on the desktop.
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 -- The Plasma desktop and application menu
(full image size: 331kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
At first there was no immediately obvious way to launch a system installer. There is no installer icon in the quick-launch buttons, on the desktop, or in the Favourites launchers in the application menu. I found the Calamares installer under the System sub-menu of the application menu.
Installing
Launching the Calamares installer walks us quickly through the usual steps. Calamares is quite polished these days and makes it easy to set our time zone, pick a language and keyboard layout, and create a user account. The installer supports guided partitioning which uses up free space on the drive as well as providing a friendly (and flexible) manual partition editor. The manual option is easy to navigate and supports virtually every Linux (and MINIX) filesystem possible.
On the first screen of the installer there are a couple of buttons, one labelled Donate and one labelled Archman Support. Clicking either of these buttons does nothing. Apart from this, the installer worked flawlessly. Calamares copied its packages to the hard drive and offered to restart the computer.
The Plasma desktop locked itself during the install process and I found the live environment's password has been left blank. This is handy as we can just press the Enter key to return to the desktop when the screen locks.
First impressions
Archman boots to a graphical login screen. A list of available accounts sit above a password box which itself sits above buttons to shutdown or restart the system. These controls are shifted over to the right side of the display which gives the screen a slightly off-balance look. When there are multiple user accounts on the system the login page defaults to selecting the first account alphabetically rather than selecting the last account to login. This is unfortunate if your main user account is, for example, "Jesse" and you create an account called "Guest" for visitors.
When we sign into an account the system brings up the Plasma desktop and plays a laser zapping sound in the background. The desktop remains fairly empty as there is no welcome window or initial setup wizard. Each time I logged in a pop-up would let me know the computer was connected to a local network, but otherwise Plasma remains quiet.
The Plasma desktop generally works as expected. I did make a few changes early on. For example, the Plasma desktop locks after five minutes and puts the screen to sleep after ten. This is much too quick for my taste and I adjusted these options through the System Settings panel. Archman defaults to a bright theme (Breeze) and I soon changed it to the Dark version of Breeze to tone down the backgrounds of some applications.
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 -- Running Firefox and LibreOffice
(full image size: 113kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Hardware
When I began running Archman it was in a VirtualBox environment. The Plasma desktop did not perform well at first in the virtual machine. While the desktop would usually resize to fit the VirtualBox window it sometimes failed to do so and the desktop lagged a bit. Plasma was still usable, but not really responsive and there was a notable delay when moving windows. After disabling compositing and some KDE features the desktop became more responsive, but never really got to the point of being as snappy as I usually expect from KDE Plasma.
Networking in the virtual machine was worse though. Network traffic was slow and some web pages took a minute to load while, on other devices running on the same network at the same time, would load the same pages in just a few seconds.
These performance issues disappeared when I switched over to running Archman on my workstation. The distribution correctly identified and utilized all my hardware and performed quickly. Both desktop responsiveness and networking were great when run on physical hardware.
Archman uses more than the average amount of disk space, about 7.5GB. However, the distribution used less memory than usual. When logged into Plasma Archman consumed only 335MB of RAM. This is unusually light for a distribution running KDE Plasma, and puts it close to the weight of Xfce on most distributions I have used lately. For comparison's sake 335MB is less than half the memory I needed to run recent distributions with GNOME Shell.
Applications
Archman ships with a fairly standard set of applications, though with a few surprises. For example, the distribution ships the Firefox web browser with a Flash plugin, which is unusual these days. LibreOffice is installed for us along with the Okular document viewer, the Konversation IRC client, and Dolphin file manager. Both KGet and lftp are present for downloading files. The GNU Image Manipulation Program and Inkscape are set up for us. There are modules for setting up printers.
Archman ships with multiple multimedia players, including Clementine, mpv, and VLC. The project provides media codecs for playing most video and audio formats. Java is installed for us and two compilers (the GNU Compiler Collection and Clang) are present. Archman uses the systemd init software and version 5.9.8 of the Linux kernel.
The included software all ran as expected and seemed to be pleasantly up to date. The one exception was Clementine which, the first time I launched it, took about a minute to load. The delay was long enough I checked the process monitor to make sure the application was loading and noticed a bunch of processes indicating the system was accessing a database and reading plugins. I have not encountered this delay when running Clementine on other distributions.
Archman ships with two settings panels, the KDE System Settings panel I mentioned before and the Archman Settings Manager. The former handles configuring all aspects of the Plasma desktop. There are a lot of settings to be found in Plasma and this makes the desktop very flexible, though one can quickly get lost in all the options. The Archman Settings Manager has only a few modules in it for handling user accounts, setting the system clock, adjusting the keyboard layout, and managing language support.
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 -- The two settings panels
(full image size: 161kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
This second settings panel is fairly empty and I was surprised there weren't more items included. The application menu, for instance, has a printing manager which could be included in the Archman settings panel, but it isn't for some reason. Likewise, there is a hardware information module in the menu which would be right at home in the settings panel, perhaps with a firewall tool. Perhaps those will come later.
Software management
When it came to managing software, Archman threw me a few curveballs. The main software manager, the one in the desktop's Favourites menu, is Discover. Launching Discover opens the software centre and causes the error "No application back-ends found, please report to your distribution." In other words, there is no low-level package manager Discover knows how to talk to on the system, or at least none it can find.
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 -- Discover unable to find a back-end
(full image size: 142kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
With some looking around I did find a second package manager, Pamac, which is listed in the application menu as "Add/Remove Software". This software centre offers us three tabs: Browse, Installed, and Updates. The Updates tab displays available new package versions and offers to install them. This works and I had no trouble with the Updates tab.
The Browse tab, on the other hand, starts out by showing us software categories down the left side of the window and specific applications from the categories on the right side. Every category, save Productivity, was empty. The Productivity category contained just one package: the Links text-based web browser. This is really unusual and this lack of options persisted across multiple uses of Pamac, even after the package database had been refreshed.
I did find I could locate packages in the software centre by switching the Browse filter from Categories to Groups or Repositories. This allows us to search through software by specific, low-level groupings, and by repositories (such as Core or Community). This doesn't make it particularly easy to find what we need, but it does display the full range of expected software. There was still a lingering problem though: the software centre didn't handle dependencies properly.
Archman GNU/Linux 2020-11-12 -- Running the Dolphin file manager and searching for new software
(full image size: 182kB, resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)
Trying to install new software would bring up a huge list of dependencies to be downloaded, including some which were already installed. As an example, when I tried to install the command line traceroute package there were dozens of dependencies, totalling 195MB in size. These included components of KDE, the Firefox browser (which was already installed), additional fonts, multiple archive managers, and a text editor. Switching to the command line and installing traceroute through the pacman package manager revealed no dependencies were required and the total download for the new software would be less than 1MB. There is a huge discrepancy here and one which could take less experienced users by surprise.
Conclusions
For the most part my time with Archman was fairly typical of using a modern distribution. The installation went smoothly, the usual, popular open source applications were available, desktop performance was good on the workstation and about average, at least once I had tweaked settings, in the virtual machine. Most applications and settings worked the way I wanted and I generally could just focus on getting stuff done without worrying about the underlying operating system.
However, there were a number of curious choices and obvious bugs in this release. As I mentioned early on, booting in UEFI mode is a challenge because starting the live desktop is not the default option in the boot menu. There are some little quirks with settings, or the location of some items, but most of them are fine. The big issues for me were to do with package management. I'm very puzzled by Discover being the default package manager when it has no back-end, preventing it from functioning at all. The second package manager wasn't much better since its default view provides access to only one package and dependency resolution seems to be broken. Working with software on the command line works fine so this does not appear to be a problem with Archman as a whole, just the graphical front-end for package management.
In the end I got along okay with Archman. The distribution did not, in my opinion, do anything remarkably well or stand out from other Arch-based distributions in any way that grabbed my attention. It's a mostly solid operating system with a few notable issues that I could work around. I think the biggest issue most people will likely face is each snapshot offers different editions. Which means if you want, for example, the MATE flavour, you will end up downloading an old snapshot and then installing a lot of updates to bring the system up to date. Otherwise Archman provided a mostly good, occasionally puzzling, but on the whole uneventful experience.
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Hardware used in this review
My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications:
- Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU
- Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive
- Memory: 6GB of RAM
- Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card, Ralink RT5390R PCIe Wireless card
- Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card
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Visitor supplied rating
Archman GNU/Linux has a visitor supplied average rating of: 9.4/10 from 11 review(s).
Have you used Archman GNU/Linux? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
openSUSE and CloudLinux promote their CentOS alternatives, Tails talks about their adjusted release cycle
Following the news that CentOS Linux is being phased out in favour of the more experimental CentOS Stream, several organizations have stepped forward to offer alternatives. The openSUSE project played up their distribution's predictability: "Users of the community enterprise distributions can be confident in the direction of openSUSE Leap for those who might be hunting for a stable Linux distribution that offers predictability and longevity." Meanwhile the CloudLinux team pledged to make it easy to migrate from CentOS to their Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone: "You will be able to convert CentOS 8.3 to CloudLinux 8.3 using our cldeploy script when the CloudLinux OS 8.3 gradual rollout will be completed. We're planning to complete it by December 21." It looks like several organizations plan to fill in the gap left by Red Hat's announcement to drop support for CentOS.
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The Tails project has published their monthly newsletter which outlines work going into the privacy-focused distribution. The team has increased their release frequency to match Mozilla's development cycle, worked on raising funds to keep the project active, and improved the persistent storage front-end. Some of the highlights are as follows: "We had a meeting to prioritize & organize work on our next big things. We decided to first focus on: Wayland blockers, that can be addressed incrementally. Deal with deprecation of Tor Launcher. Rewrite Persistent Storage GUI front-end. We scheduled a sprint in January to bootstrap our work on the RIPE grant and on Wayland blockers."
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
What to do in the wake of Red Hat phasing out CentOS
Alone and wandering asks: Following the news CentOS is being killed off, what will happen next? Where should people like me migrate to, any suggestions?
DistroWatch answers: A week ago we shared reports from the CentOS and Red Hat teams that indicated the CentOS Linux distribution will be phased out over the coming years: "There will not be a CentOS Linux 9. Updates for the CentOS Linux 8 distribution continue until December 31, 2021. Updates for the CentOS Linux 7 distribution continue as before until June 30, 2024."
Basically, this means that CentOS Linux, the binary-compatible clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, will no longer be supported in a few years. The CentOS Stream distribution will continue to exist. CentOS Stream is basically a rolling release and testing ground which sits between the Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux distributions. Software will be introduced in Fedora, tested and tweaked in CentOS Stream, and wind up in stable releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Following the news that CentOS Linux (the stable RHEL clone) will no longer be supported, a lot of people naturally wondered what they should do next. CentOS Linux was thought to feature ten years of support and was compatible with RHEL, making it a prime choice among small and medium businesses, many website hosting companies, and any other environments where people wanted long-term stability, but did not need paid support contracts. Red Hat is effectively killing off the CentOS Linux distribution and many people are left wondering what to do with the thousands of servers currently running CentOS Linux.
If you are running CentOS Linux, what options do you have and what should you do? The first thing I feel everyone should do is take a deep breath and try to avoid any knee-jerk reactions. Whenever a change like this is announced people tend to want to rush out and start performing fresh installs of a new operating system to deal with the problem right away. There seems to be a sense of trying to leave a sinking ship before all the life boats are full. However, let's take a step back and realize that if you are running a supported version of CentOS Linux (versions 7 and 8) then you have at least a year to figure out what do do with those systems. There is no rush and I recommend waiting a bit for the dust to settle on the situation before leaping to an alternative.
There is more good news about making decisions when it comes to migrating from CentOS Linux, apart from a distant deadline: there are a lot of options available! Here are a handful, in no particular order:
- One option is to move from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. The technology will be similar, most of the same packages will be available. The Stream branch will be slightly more experimental and won't have the static stability of RHEL or CentOS Linux, but it will probably be close. For smaller deployments or situations where a rolling development cycle is acceptable, CentOS Stream may be the migration path with the least amount of change required.
- Another approach would be to migrate to RHEL. While most Red Hat installations require a paid subscription, there are no-cost developer accounts to be had at the moment. In the future Red Hat has suggested it will provide inexpensive or no-cost subscriptions to ease the migration from CentOS Linux to RHEL.
In the first half of 2021, we will be introducing low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases, including options for open source projects and communities, partner ecosystems and an expansion of the use cases of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscription to better serve the needs of systems administrators and partner developers.
The problem here, of course, is that Red Hat has not yet revealed the low- or no-cost options it plans to make available. They may be suitable for existing CentOS users or not, but we won't know until sometime next year.
On a personal note, I can't help but feel Red Hat approached this situation backwards. Red Hat could have rolled out no-cost subscriptions for RHEL first, then released a CentOS-to-RHEL conversion tool, then announced CentOS Linux would be discontinued. People would have had a clear migration path they could test right away. As it is, CentOS Linux users are left wondering what, if any, solution Red Hat will provide sometime in the next six months. This looks like the vendor equivalent of a cartoon character sawing off the tree branch they are sitting on.
- If waiting for Red Hat's upcoming low-cost subscriptions does not appeal then the good news is there are already several existing distributions in the same family as CentOS. Our Search page lists six actively maintained RHEL clones and chances are at least one of them will fill the void of a no-cost, RHEL clone.
- People who particularly like CentOS and the way the project was run may want to hold out for the inevitable fork. Already a few new projects have been announced which intend to take the place of CentOS Linux. The Rocky Linux distribution is being created by a former CentOS developer and the CloudLinux team have announced their intentions of making a publicly available RHEL clone.
- A final option is to select another distribution with similar characteristics to CentOS. There are a number of stable, long-term support distributions which are often used in businesses and large deployments. The SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE distributions leap to mind and they share a relationship which is roughly equivalent to RHEL and CentOS Linux, respectively. The Debian and Ubuntu projects both offer at least five years of support on a stable base. For people willing to go a little further afield there is FreeBSD which runs most of the same software and provides five years of support.
In short, there are a lot of options, a lot of alternative distributions, and it's entirely possible Red Hat will offer no-cost subscriptions next year for people seeking a migration plan. My recommendation is to give the situation a few months and then test the above options to see which one best suits your needs.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
NuTyX 20.12.0
NuTyX is a French Linux distribution (with multi-language support) built from Linux From Scratch and Beyond Linux From Scratch, with a custom package manager called "cards". The project has published a new version with multiple supported desktop editions. "21 months after the release of the first version of NuTyX 11, I am very happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 20.12.0 and cards 2.4.123. The 64-bit version is a complete new project. The compilation chain is completely rebuilt in addition to glibc 2.32, GCC 10.2.0 and binutils 2.34. The Xorg-server graphics server version 1.20.10, the Mesa 3D library in 20.3.0, GTK3 3.24.24 and Qt 5.15.2 are also in their latest versions. The Python interpreters are at 3.9.0 and 2.7.18. The Xfce desktop environment is updated to version 4.14.3. The MATE desktop environment is also updated to version 1.24, the latest version available. The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.20.4, Framework 5.76.0 and Applications 20.12.0. Available browsers are: Firefox 83.0, Chromium 87.0.4280.88, Falkon 3.1.0, Epiphany 3.38.2." Additional information can be found on the project's News page.
NuTyX 20.12.0 -- Running the MATE desktop
(full image size: 215kB, resolution: 2560x1600 pixels)
UBports 16.04 OTA-15
The UBports team has announced a new update for UBports 16.04. The new update, OTA-15, introduces stable support for more devices and provides a number improvements to the camera app, web browser, and calls: "Ratchanan finally got fed up with the "Redial last called number" button not working on his Bluetooth headset and fixed it. Now it is possible to dial calls from Bluetooth devices, including some car infotainment systems which provide an interface to browse your phone's contacts. Unfortunately, whilst dialing calls was fixed, the subsequent call audio is still broken. Some devices will still have trouble connecting two-way audio, and some have even reported adverse effects when trying it. For example, the Nexus 5 may play loud static over the Bluetooth headset instead of the caller's audio. Please try a test call (while you are in a safe place!) and report the result back to us before trying to take a call while driving. Ratchanan also added a Thai input method to our on-screen keyboard. It does not have auto-correction, but this is an excellent addition for our Thai users. Thank you, Ratchanan! If you are using a device with an arm64 build of Ubuntu Touch, you may have noticed that missed calls were reported by the caller's number rather than by their contact name. This issue has also now been fixed." Further details are available in the project's release announcement.
Q4OS 3.13
The Q4OS team have published a new update to their distribution's Debian-based desktop operating system. The project's new release updates the Q4OS 3.x series, bringing it up to date with Debian's Stable branch. For this release Canonical's Snap framework has been removed, though it can be installed from the project's software repositories. "An update to Q4OS 3 Centaurus LTS has been released. The new 3.13 Series receives the recent Debian Buster 10.7 update, updated Debian stable kernel, important security and bug fixes, and several specific Q4OS enhancements. Canonical's Snap daemon and related dependencies have been removed from the Q4OS desktop profiles, however they're still available in the default repositories. A few printing specific bugs has been patched and a new driver installer for Hewlett-Packard printers and scanners has been included in the Software center. In addition to the above, Q4OS 3.13 brings other enhancements, such as improved Calamares installer and a cumulative upgrade covering all changes from the previous stable Q4OS 3 Centaurus release." The distribution's blog offers additional information. The project provides two editions, one with the KDE Plasma desktop and the other with the Trinity desktop environment (TDE).
Kwort 4.3.5
Kwort is a CRUX-based Linux distribution that uses the GTK+ toolkit and the Openbox window manager. Its most prominent feature is a package manager, called kpkg. The project's latest version, Kwort 4.3.5, introduces updated kernel, compiler, and package management packages. The distribution's news page lists the highlights of the release: "I'm very proud to announce this new release which shows how the project got to a very mature level. New goodies included in the UI, a few bug fixes from the previous release and of course, the latest stable packages. Let's talk a little of what we have here: Linux kernel 5.10.1. Yes, the brand new Linux LTS release. New toolchain including: glibc 2.32, gcc 10.2.0 and binutils 2.35.1. kpkg 130. Mirror kdb files are now included in the installation to avoid repeating issues from the past. Latest browsers including: Google Chrome: 87.0.4280.88 and Mozilla Firefox 84.0. Newest version of brave is already available in the mirrors. kwort-tools now includes encryption support through /etc/rc.d/encryption using /etc/etab (format is 'directory' 'key file') and we have added a few improvements on kwort-mixer to add more stability. llvm 11.0.0 is also included."
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,274
- Total data uploaded: 35.4TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
Where will you go now that CentOS Linux is being discontinued?
Last week we reported the CentOS Linux distribution is being discontinued in favour of the CentOS Stream edition. This decision has left a lot of CentOS users scrambling to find alternatives to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone. We talked about several CentOS Linux alternatives in this week's Questions and Answers column.
Were you affected by the decision to drop CentOS Linux support? Let us know what your migration plans are in the comments.
You can see the results of our previous poll on the number of entries in your fstab file in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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I am moving from CentOS Linux to...
| CentOS Stream: | 89 (3%) |
| Debian/Ubuntu: | 412 (16%) |
| FreeBSD: | 78 (3%) |
| Oracle Linux: | 81 (3%) |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux: | 17 (1%) |
| Springdale Linux: | 22 (1%) |
| SUSE/openSUSE: | 161 (6%) |
| Another RHEL clone: | 96 (4%) |
| Another enterprise Linux platform: | 9 (0%) |
| Another solution/operating system: | 24 (1%) |
| Unsure: | 94 (4%) |
| I was not running CentOS: | 1509 (58%) |
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| Website News |
DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 4 January 2021. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Article Search page. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
- Bruce Patterson (podcast)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Archman (by Linuxista on 2020-12-21 00:17:40 GMT from United States)
Graphical frontends for pkg mgmt on Arch are unnecessary and counterproductive anyway.
2 • Where will you go now that ... (by LiuYan on 2020-12-21 01:24:45 GMT from China)
☑ CentOS Stream -- maybe, or maybe not
✅ Debian -- it meets my requirement: lots of packages in official repository
☐ FreeBSD -- the license is good, but it needs longer learning curve
☑ Oracle Linux -- maybe, or maybe not
...
3 • Package Management GUI, dependencies (by Fossilizing Dinosaur on 2020-12-21 01:57:28 GMT from United States)
Octopi and Pamac come to mind … quickly. Artix has those; doesn't Void too?
(@1 - OK, so you're no Steve Jobs.)
…
Re: "… a huge list of dependencies …" - were any of these marked "optional"?
Was it possible to avoid unnecessary (related) packages?
If an unnecessary package was selected for removal, did it try to yank needed packages as well?
4 • Archman (by Tech in San Diego on 2020-12-21 02:46:22 GMT from United States)
1) To UEFI or not to UEFI. I wish there was some standardization or auto-detect feature that we could all agree on.
2) Community vs. proprietary based repo's would help. I prefer the old reliable command line.
3) Virtualbox used to be my go-to app for testing distro's. Over the past year and a half, maybe longer, I have noticed that distro's running in VB have had performance issues and introduced challenges not related to the distro.
4) That "phaser" sound on boot wasn't a phaser. It was a subliminal message. :~)
Happy Holidays to All and may 2021 be better than 2020!
5 • Arch pkg mgmt (by WhoDon'tKnowSheet on 2020-12-21 03:04:44 GMT from Canada)
@1, "Graphical frontends for pkg mgmt on Arch are unnecessary and counterproductive anyway."
Many things are unnecessary: air conditioning, auto transmissions, soap, perfume, and so on, even Linux itself. But it's sure nice to have them if you want them. "Counterproductive" depends on who is doing the producing. In effect, you've disguised an opinion as a fact. You could have just said: "I don' like graphical frontends," which is your privilege.
As for Archman, seems it may be better not to rush things out the door. I've tried Archman before, and it was okay. These days I use pretty much the same system, but it's Manjaro, which hits the sweetspot between bleeding-edge and stability. Pamac works well, including "Categories", almost as well as Synaptic on Debian. Discover is not included.
6 • Archman & Others (by c00ter on 2020-12-21 03:18:54 GMT from United States)
Yet Another Easy Arch Installer. I trialed Archman a few months back. Most bring little to the table but themselves. There are a few exceptions, such as Garuda. I find the Calamares graphical installer limited in configurability. For a script that is superior to any Calamares install routine, I recommend Archfi. But superior to all is the way it is supposed to be, as recommended by Archlinux.
Regards to all. Stay safe and guard your data.
7 • using a gui to install arch and/or arch based distros (by Brad on 2020-12-21 03:45:08 GMT from United States)
Do people still brag about installing arch the command line way while having bamboo under their finger & toenails anymore? Just asking for a friend...
8 • @3 - Void (by Hoos on 2020-12-21 03:52:58 GMT from Singapore)
Void is not Arch-based and does not have pamac.
It does have octoxbps, which is the octopi variant that uses their package management backend, xbps.
9 • Where will you go now that CentOS Linux is being discontinued? (by Dan on 2020-12-21 07:43:00 GMT from Germany)
I have started to move to a mix of Debian and Ubuntu a few years back, as my developers are more happy with those system as it's closer to their dev machines.
I guess now it's time to kill the last few CentOS around and fully move them to Debian.
I can't say I am sad or I'll miss much honestly, Debian is amazing and Ubuntu give us the commercial support in the few systems we need it.
I wish APT had transactions as DNF/YUM, but using ansible with everything it's not a big deal.
10 • Archman (by Bob on 2020-12-21 07:50:09 GMT from United States)
I've been running Archman Xfce for some time now and am completely happy with it. Originally, on a spare hard drive, I installed four Arch xfce distros to compare each on a daily basis. Manjaro, Arco, Endeavour, and Archman. After 30 days, Archman was the winner for me. Manjaro, Arco, and Endeavour had problems throughout the month, whereas Archman presented no problems what-so-ever. (Your results may vary.)
11 • Manjaro and Pekwm (by Any on 2020-12-21 07:51:30 GMT from Spain)
Personally I prefer more conservative distros but the last week I tried Manjaro and I can say I liked it more than my previous attempts, but when I install prism I can not log in to it. As my daily driver I want a distro with KDE and no systemd. The last candidate is Q4OS. Or maybe I will try any BSD for that.
12 • And what about Oracle Linux? (by Microlinux on 2020-12-21 08:11:33 GMT from France)
If you want a free-as-in-beer RHEL clone, you have two options: Oracle Linux or Springdale/PUIAS. My company's currently moving its servers to OL, which is "CentOS done right". Here's a blog article about the subject:
https://blog.microlinux.fr/migration-centos-oracle-linux/
Currently Rocky Linux is not much more than a README file on Github and a handful of Slack (ew!) discussion channels.
Each version of OL is supported for a 10-year cycle. Ubuntu has five years of support. And Debian's support cycle (one year after subsequent release) is unusable for production servers.
13 • @11, KDE, systemd (by Justme on 2020-12-21 08:25:45 GMT from United States)
"I want a distro with KDE and no systemd. The last candidate is Q4OS."
Q4OS has systemd. You might try MX19 KDE, which is based on Debian minus systemd.
14 • Discover (by Alan on 2020-12-21 08:52:49 GMT from Croatia)
Just install packagekit-qt5 package and Discover will work just fine, logout and reload repositories data if needed and you're good to go.
15 • KDE NOSYSTEMD (by Hank on 2020-12-21 10:09:12 GMT from France)
You might try MX19 KDE, which is based on Debian minus systemd.
MX has systemD, you can boot without it being active..
16 • @11 KDE system of choice (by kc1di on 2020-12-21 10:30:52 GMT from United States)
I run MX-19 KDE, You have a choice of Systemd or not. a normal boot will boot in non systemd. It's good and solid and has the tools I need for daily work. Give it a try I think you'll like it.
17 • @11 KDE without systemD choice (by Pawan on 2020-12-21 11:53:33 GMT from India)
Devuan provides KDE and is most prominant Linux distribution without systemD (completely removes systemD, not only avoids it for init but also for service management, completely removed from OS) and it is one of the most stable and light weight too (no unwanted packages and high performance). I am using it on both laptop and desktop and very pleased with it. You can try.
18 • CentOS mode change of distribution (by Gerhard Goetzhaber on 2020-12-21 12:57:35 GMT from Austria)
My personal OS for everything what may be called daily work has become OpenSUSE Leap for a few years. By now, Leap has outdistanced CentOS as well as RHEL as it's kernel and actual software are a lot closer to the current ones but that way after all SUSE still prevents incompatibilities between proven hardware and your system as, however, may often surprisingly happen with many up2date distributions, e.g. dysfunction of printers whenever a modern distro (first and foremost Fedora) comes with a brand new version of CUPS and a downgrade of such deeply integrated libraries is completely illusive. I hate that!
Besides SUSE, I've still be using CentOS as a reserve, and for that I think Stream will be good enough, too. Ubuntu and Debian (or systems nearer to the pure Debian, respectively) may hardly reach the reliability of any dedicated EL (except Oracle which will always be a nogo for any true NERDs) ... ; )
19 • @Jesse on CentOS: (by dragonmouth on 2020-12-21 13:11:04 GMT from United States)
"There is no rush and I recommend waiting a bit for the dust to settle on the situation before leaping to an alternative. "
For private users there may be plenty of time to find an alternative. However, corporate IT departments are not like jet skis able to turn on a dime. They are more like supertankers or aircraft carriers that take miles to make a turn. By the time all the committees meet and come to some decision, by the time all the upper managers who don't know what the heck they are talking about expound their opinions and by the time the CentOS replacement is deployed, a year will be gone. For corporations, maybe it is not a time to PANIC, yet, but it is high time to start looking for the O/S that will replace CentOS.
20 • @13,16 and 17 (by Any on 2020-12-21 13:22:48 GMT from Spain)
Thank you all. MX is not my distro. I do not know what but something repels me every time I try it. Last night I downloaded Antix core, base and full editions but it does not seem (to me) the right distro for a modern PC with plenty of RAM. Devuan - I also gave it a try. But if only I had a Slackware with the lazy "apt install" ...
Now I am too lazy to slackbuild everything I need. I hope Patrick Volkerding will surpass the problems he has and he and his team release a new version soon. Something makes me beleive that they are preparing big changes and why not a more comfortable (read lazy) package manager.
21 • CentOS and Kwort page (by cykodrone on 2020-12-21 13:25:58 GMT from Germany)
Yawn, gee, yet another corp executing the 'swallow and kill' tactic. There's been an epidemic of this tactic in the IT/software world (and other industries) for decades, you're just now getting outraged? *facepalm*
Subscribing is enabling this behavior, so is making accounts on certain monopoly platforms and giving them your life's info for their NSA and consumer demographic predictive matrix algorithms.
Vote with your wallets/purses, and your privacy.
Dear DW, on your Kwort (its main distro) page, the (based on) CRUX link takes one to your 'based on' search. Isn't it supposed to take me to CRUX's DW distro page? Both CRUX and Kwort look like pretty cool roll up your sleeves and scrape some knuckles do-it-yourself bloatless back to basics sanity. :)
22 • What to use... (by Friar Tux on 2020-12-21 13:56:59 GMT from Canada)
I voted 'not using CentOS'. While I like the concept behind the (original) CentOS, I found it to have a lot of the same issues as Fedora. Too high maintenance for me. I picked the Debian, Ubuntu, Mint line which hasn't (yet) presented me with any issues. (Have been using now for five years. (Using Mint, that is.) Criminities, I sound like a druggy.)
@19 (dragonmouth) Love the analogies. And absolutely true. It will take a year or two for the big corps to change direction.
23 • @20 KDE without systemd (by Andy Prough on 2020-12-21 14:36:25 GMT from United States)
If you tried MX KDE version and didn't like it, you should try Artix, which is Arch without systemd. They have KDE versions available for download. With Artix, you've got to choose your init system - openrc, runit, or S6. I found the openrc version was the most stable and best supported.
Another one is PCLinuxOS - that will give you a nice Plasma desktop without systemd. PCLinuxOS has a big following - users love it and stick with it for many years.
24 • CentOS and search (by Jesse on 2020-12-21 14:57:32 GMT from Canada)
@19: "For private users there may be plenty of time to find an alternative. However, corporate IT departments are not like jet skis able to turn on a dime. "
Yes, that is because big corporate IT departments have built-in processes which prevent them from panicking and doing some knee-jerk reaction. They don't need to take my "don't panic, just wait" advice, because it's hardwired into their environment. The outcome is exactly the same (slow decision making, lots of evaluation, weighing pros and cons) but it's automatic with them while smaller groups and individuals don't have that fail-safe which is who my advice is directed at.
@21: "Dear DW, on your Kwort (its main distro) page, the (based on) CRUX link takes one to your 'based on' search. Isn't it supposed to take me to CRUX's DW distro page?"
No, the fields on each distro's information page have always been shortcuts to the Search page to help people find similar/related projects.
25 • MX Linus and systemd (by Chris Whelan on 2020-12-21 15:00:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
@13
Just to clarify, all versions of MX Linux use sysvinit to boot by default, but allow packages that need systemd present to work using systemd-shim.
In order to cover those situations where booting with systemd is mandated, such as running Snaps, there is a GRUB option to use systemd as the init.
26 • A few companies are already promoting their alternatives to CentOS with openSUSE (by chris on 2020-12-21 15:25:59 GMT from United Kingdom)
openSUSE ? then asking for support? good luck with some megalomaniacs - esp moderators of- their forum that behave like they own it.
27 • @26 openSUSE forum (by Andy Prough on 2020-12-21 15:54:43 GMT from United States)
> openSUSE ? then asking for support? good luck with some megalomaniacs - esp moderators of- their forum that behave like they own it.
My experience for many years with opensuse forums was quite the opposite - very helpful people. The SUSE engineers are frequent contributors, and I've seen them on many occasions purchase a piece of hardware to test it and try to help a user overcome a problem with it. It is one of the best forums for any distro I've ever seen, quite possibly the best.
28 • Archman (by Jérôme on 2020-12-21 16:32:58 GMT from France)
A distro with a national flag as a logo ? It's a no-go for me ! Keep nationalism out of GNU/Linux.
29 • CentOS (by David on 2020-12-21 17:10:18 GMT from United Kingdom)
I dropped CentOS a year ago when my hard drive died and I needed a new installation. At the time, Xfce was not yet ready for CentOS and the team were expressing frustration at the extent that Red Hat was getting tied to Gnome. A sad day: I've used the Red Hat family since Red Hat 9. I moved to PCLinuxOX — not an option I could vote for in your poll (no "other" category) — with some uncertainly over whether a rolling release would be stable. It is!
30 • "This looks like the vendor equivalent..." (by Ricardo on 2020-12-21 18:06:49 GMT from Argentina)
... of a cartoon character sawing off the tree branch they are sitting on."
Jesse, I couldn't have articulated it better.
I'm stealing that phrase :)
Cheers and happy holidays to everyone!
31 • @11 KDE and no systemd (by Ricardo on 2020-12-21 18:26:50 GMT from Argentina)
Yet another alternative would be the upcoming Slackware 15.0, of which you can try the development (-current) version easily thanks to AleinBOB's excellent liveslak project:
https://alien.slackbook.org/blog/slackware-live-edition/
https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:liveslak
I'm using it as my daily driver and, despite some churn from time to time, it's been a very stable experience.
Cheers!
32 • Poll Accuracy (by Dr. Dave on 2020-12-21 20:21:09 GMT from United States)
At the time I am writing this, the current poll indicates 34% of the respondents are currently using CentOS. Of course, I don't have a crystal ball sitting here, but this result seems highly dubious. Due to the recent news, maybe there are more 'irregular' readers from the CentOS tribe than usual and folks who administrate it professionally, but my guess is that people who don't even use CentOS are stuffing the vote to enhance the perception of their personal preferences. I realize it's just a DW poll, but it still made me raise an eyebrow-- though I suppose we should all be used to shady voting practices by now. :P
33 • CentOS (by aaro on 2020-12-21 21:25:53 GMT from Venezuela)
I think we are losing the prespective of the real centos sutation impact here. All this situation has an effect mainly at server/enterprise level. Not at a desktop level. Because the userbase using centos as a desktop is minimal. The spot is at the production server / enterprise level. Just think all major hosting companies that have used centos as the underlying platform for many years. All the institutions/business running their systems/servers on centos, that's the taget of the issue here. And of course, these servers need an stable, predictable and long time supported os.
Debian is what comes closer to that as centos dissapear, yet still is a great loss. I hope rocky linux gets all the support it needs to become the next centos and hope the leaders of this new project take some preventive actions to avoid another sale to Red Hat or any other corporation in the future to avoid the story to repeat in a few years.
34 • Did you try MX Linux or just Antix? (by Ted H in Minnesota on 2020-12-21 21:33:07 GMT from United States)
DW Commenter #20 (Any from Spain)- MX Linux and Antix are quite different animals. I like MX Linux and am not comfortable with Antix. Did you try Antix and not MX Linux? For me, MX Linux is like a comfortable old shoe, and "thinks"/does things the way I do, and pretty much like to do them. The only thing I don't like is that when one updates it is all-or-nothing - one cannot uncheck the updates one does not want!
Ted
35 • @34: (by dragonmouth on 2020-12-21 22:18:04 GMT from United States)
Are you using Synaptic to update/upgrade your software? Synaptic allows you to choose only the packages you want to update.
36 • CentOS and the Poll (by Otis on 2020-12-21 22:48:11 GMT from United States)
@32 CentOS currently gets over 500 hits per day here at DW. So.. the high percentage of current users being attracted to that poll seems other than "shady," to me.
37 • Distro for "Any" from Spain (by Somewhat Reticent on 2020-12-22 03:09:04 GMT from United States)
@11 - Have you tried Artix Linux? [See ArtixLinux.org ]
They offer many choices - init, DE, even some loaded images from the community.
38 • CentOS (by bucklemyjandals on 2020-12-22 04:08:08 GMT from New Zealand)
So I have not used CentOS, but understand it to be a freebie RHEL more for servers. Most of the distros we commonly know are GUI aimed at desktop use. So CentOS going away is RH/IBM trying to herd people towards paid support. Maybe they can offer a really cheap tier for non-profits and small businesses. Otherwise the alternatives list gets interesting, especially as these users would like something stable and reliable.
Don't know if MZ, OpenSUSE or Artix or others would fit the bill. Maybe. Much of the discussion seems fixated on systemd (again) instead of features that allow the work (of the business / oragnisation) to get done. The OS is a platform for the tools, no more.
39 • Centos (by David on 2020-12-22 04:29:46 GMT from United States)
I was using Centos 8.2 on an older, desktop home computer. When Centos dropped long term support on version 8, I was a little peeved, but not a whole lot, since it is free, anyway. Out of curiosity I installed Scientific Linux 7.9 on the same computer, and it works better that Centos 8. Then I tried installing SL 7.9 on my old laptop -- it even worked on that!
Previously, when I had tried to install Centos 8 on the laptop, an old Dell inspiron 1501, the graphics were garbage --the screen displayed kind of a color mosaic --and the keyboard/everthing else was locked up. I also tried Centos 7.9 on it and installation from minimal dvd produced a bunch of errors and then froze part way through.
I will stick with Scientific Linux 7 for now. In 2024 I will worry about which distro to migrate to. Note: Scientific Linux websites states that they are going to reconsider (in 1st quarter of 2021) whether they will produce a clone of rhel version 8. Previously, they stated that they would not.
40 • Scientific Linux (by Simon on 2020-12-22 05:36:53 GMT from New Zealand)
It's a pity this distro (Scientific, a RHEL clone developed by particle physicists for their labs) decided to shut up shop and tell all its users to migrate to CentOS. Some of them will be wishing they hadn't done that now, although I can see it made sense at the time as they were basically duplicating what CentOS was doing. As I recall it was a good free RHEL clone, though a little slower to do its rebuild of each RHEL source release than CentOS. I wondered if Scientific developers might be thinking of starting it up again, since they basically only stopped because CentOS was there (and it ain't any more): that's good news, David (#39), that they've said explicitly that they're considering it. Scientific would be my preferred RHEL clone (over e.g. Oracle) if they did resurrect it.
41 • Thank you everyone (by Any on 2020-12-22 08:30:05 GMT from Spain)
And I apologize for not expressing me in a more clear way. I know MX and Antix are different distros.
@31 Ricardo from Argentina, I wrote in an upper comment that now I am too lazy for using Slackware for my daily driver. Despite Slackware being my favourite distro I prefer another one with a package manager that does not make me work too much ( for everyday use) :) Anyway I almost always have Slackware on a partition.
@37 Thank you for your suggestion. I tried Artix last night and it looks promising.
One weird thing - I tried installing PekWM in Manjaro and Artix and inspite installing correctly it is not possible to log in PekWM. I will try with another Arch based distro to check if it has something to do.
42 • Arch the Arch way... this again? (by Ghost Sixtyseven on 2020-12-22 10:22:37 GMT from United Kingdom)
@6 'But superior to all is the way it is supposed to be, as recommended by Archlinux.'
Strange... for the first decade (nearly) of it's existence Arch Linux had a graphical installer in the form of the Arch Installer Framework. The command-line install only became 'the Arch way' a good while after Arch arrived.
43 • Archman (by OstroL on 2020-12-22 11:16:19 GMT from Poland)
Archman is good. Installs fast and you can get a pure Arch system with few tweaks. Only, it has a religious turn, the Archman icon and some wallpapers.
44 • "Lazy" Package Manager (by whoKnows on 2020-12-22 14:37:39 GMT from Switzerland)
@20 • @13,16 and 17 (by Any)
"Now I am too lazy to slackbuild everything I need. I hope Patrick Volkerding will surpass the problems he has and he and his team release a new version soon. Something makes me beleive that they are preparing big changes and why not a more comfortable (read lazy) package manager."
Why exactly?
Salix does excatly that.
"Linux for the lazy Slacker."
It has Gslapt - Slackware 'Synaptic'.
https://www.salixos.org/
45 • @ 27 Open Suse Forums (by OstroL on 2020-12-22 15:59:57 GMT from Poland)
I would agree with Andy Prough that OpenSuse Forum has the most helpful people. They'd go out of the way to help others.
46 • Salix (by Any on 2020-12-22 16:36:28 GMT from Spain)
@44 I used Salix from 2014 to 2016 or 2017. But the last release 14.2 is almost 4 or 5 years old. And I think somewhere in the recent years slapt, Gslapt and Sourcery started to give me problems or some of them were excluded from the distro or was it something with the repos? Also the 14.2 version of Salix lacks a KDE release while the previous versions had a KDE release. I do not know but I was under the impression that Salix started being a no go for me back then.
I have tried and used Slackel as well. It looks like AlienBob's work is the only viable way these days for a up to date Slackware.
Maybe I want something for the too lazy slacker :)
47 • Slackware (by whoKnows on 2020-12-22 17:05:00 GMT from Switzerland)
@46 • Salix (by Any)
"But the last release 14.2 is almost 4 or 5 years old."
Well ... as well as Slackware itself.
Kinda simple:
Salix is a better Slackware - one of the easiest installers ever, better package management, newer versions of some SW, but still 1:1 compatible.
Slackel is kinda "Salix testing" - they even do the things together.
If you have a problem with Salix, then it's a prob with Slack.
By the way, the latest Salix isn't 14.2, but 14.2.1.
48 • Scientific Linux (by R. Cain on 2020-12-22 17:35:14 GMT from United States)
Definitely going to Scientific Linux if it gets re-started.
49 • Why exactly?? (by whoKnows on 2020-12-22 18:14:20 GMT from Switzerland)
@48 • Scientific Linux (by R. Cain)
"Definitely going to Scientific Linux if it gets re-started."
What does prevents you to use Springdale?
It's Scientific + a better repository.
50 • Moving from Centos (by Ted on 2020-12-22 20:55:37 GMT from Australia)
Where I move to will depend on pihole support as my server was running that.
Unsure if they will add a new distro to support or I will just move to Fedora.
51 • Personal opinion only. (by R. Cain on 2020-12-22 21:07:24 GMT from United States)
@49--
"...What does prevents you to use Springdale?...
Personal opinion only.
Springdale may be, and probably is, a very fine distribution, but...
After all the years of using Linux, and experiencing first-hand the hobby mentality that has taken over (users AND distro developers) starting about six years ago, I prefer to use a distribution which has all the earmarks of (make absolutely certain that you read this as "...appears to be, to ME...") being developed AND MAINTAINED by a professional organization.
Simply start with the websites of each distribution. It's as easy as that.
52 • Springdale vs. CentOS (by whoKnows on 2020-12-23 05:39:01 GMT from Switzerland)
@51 • Personal opinion only. (by R. Cain)
"Personal opinion only. [...] After all the years of using Linux, and experiencing first-hand the hobby mentality that has taken over [...], I prefer to use a distribution which has all the earmarks of [...] being developed AND MAINTAINED by a professional organization."
Yeah, your answer is exactly what I expected it to be.
The thing with Springdale is as following: it's maintained by the very professional team of IT specialists at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton University) for the own needs. That's why there's no fancy website, RHEL Wiki, live ISOs and such.
They also maintain several other repositories for add-on packages (computing, unsupported [with audio/video codecs] ...).
With other words, if you're a professional who needs an RHEL clone, you'll be fine with it; if you're a hobbyist who needs a how-to on everything and anything, you can still use the knowledge base of RHEL/CentOS/Oracle ...
If you're 'small business' who needs a professional support, you'd get RHEL - unlike CentOS, Springdale is not a commercial distribution selling you support and schooling. Springdale is made by professional and for the professionals.
https://www.ias.edu/math/computing/Springdale-Linux
https://researchcomputing.princeton.edu/faq/what-is-a-cluster
53 • CentOS dependency (by whoKnows on 2020-12-23 05:52:27 GMT from Switzerland)
"Top companies that rely on CentOS Linux include Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon. Other important technology companies build products around CentOS. These include GE, Riverbed, F5, Juniper, and Fortinet. [...] Amazon Web Services (AWS) doesn't make a point of it, but the Amazon Linux AMI, which runs on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), is also a CentOS-based RHEL clone."
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/where-centos-linux-users-can-go-from-here/ar-BB1bX4Ts
"Facebook Linux was based originally on CentOS [...] the Facebook gets its stuff certified by Red Hat Labs [...] they run their own modified version of an operating system."
http://www.internetnews.com/blog/skerner/facebook-linux-CentOS.html
54 • Pamac (by Ankleface Wroughlandmire on 2020-12-23 13:34:19 GMT from Ecuador)
I very much support the development of friendly frontends for package managers, especially ones that interface directly and don't require the abominable PackageKit layer. But I wonder if Jesse's issue with excessive dependencies in Pamac was actually not specific to Archman. Recently I helped a friend install some simple program in Manjaro with Pamac, and it also pulled in a completely ridiculous amount of dependencies. Might be something to look into fixing.
55 • CentOS (by Paul Vandenberg on 2020-12-23 14:30:02 GMT from United States)
Red Hat lost me a long time ago. Fedora was too bleeding edge and then it became too GNOME centric. Not trying to bash GNOME. I get that people like it. Just not for me. I am quite happy with Debian now.
56 • Pamac, @54 (by JustSo on 2020-12-23 14:37:05 GMT from Singapore)
Over two years on Manjaro, and haven't encountered the problems mentioned with Pamac.
57 • Arch/KDE (by Otis on 2020-12-23 15:44:50 GMT from United States)
Interesting seeing the Arch/KDE (Plasma) portion of the conversation. Those two elements of the Linux Universe don't fully reconcile with me. I know I know we need (and have) lots of diversity in Linux/BSD.. I'm even seeing KDE stuff in FreeBSD's repos and thus in my go-to GhostBSD.
Why shouldn't we? I'm not asking that but yes I'm having trouble seeing those philosophies merge.. thinking XFCE/OpenBox as ideal and now yep I'm using Mate because Ghost spins around that.
Please understand my feelings/point having to do with the whole Linux/BSD lean toward more and more code, more and more.. just more. Ugh.. Windows does that. Are we finding out over the decades that Windows had it right, from the beginning, by loading loading loading and then updating the load with another load whether we liked it or not?
58 • ReddevilHat strikes again (by Sébastien on 2020-12-23 22:24:21 GMT from France)
6 years ago CentOS felt as a benefit merging RH. At that time (you can still read it on their webpages) it was supposed to be a major step for open source community. Well now it looks like it will benefit RH for sure at lower cost. At the end,the highest price has to be paid by the whole community and betrayed CentOS true believers in particular. I was rencently planning to move a couple Debian servers to CentOS (the 10 years support was really appealling to me), I am glad I did not switch yet. Still, I feel sincerely sorry for all CentOS users today. Switching a bunch of critical servers in prod in such a short time is not piece of cake. Thank you Redhat for the good time.
59 • CENTOS? As if I care. (by StanB on 2020-12-24 01:52:19 GMT from United States)
I can care less about the CENTOS shaft. I use my trusty & far more secure OpenBSD for servers, firewalls, routers, & built-in VPN.
60 • alternatives to CentOS (by Jim Pazarena on 2020-12-24 15:46:09 GMT from Canada)
I find it odd that there are few people suggesting FreeBSD . Correct , it's -not- a Linux derivative , but it's rock solid , and has a super community with plenty of forums for assistance .
61 • Where do I go now that CentOS Linux is gone? Check our list (by JoeFootball on 2020-12-24 17:13:12 GMT from United States)
A related article from Ars Technica ...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-linux-is-gone-but-its-refugees-have-alternatives/
62 • I know were we'll go (by Soccerman on 2020-12-25 02:47:27 GMT from El Salvador)
I was thinking of waiting for Rocky Linux, but history will be repeated, Debian is a Great option, but Systemd based distros becomes slower and slower with time(the windows way), therefore, going Devuan is the best idea.
63 • Times change (by pkwright on 2020-12-25 15:26:22 GMT from United States)
First off, as a new mobile modern age has pushed our desktop and server experience more the the cloud, the monetization of those moves has been on the horizon for those in the know.
Second, it's a shame, really many folks have helped red-hat continue as a (mostly reliable upstream enterprise class platform).
next, mom and pops or SOHO's will be fine because of their adaptability, it is very hard to invest your community effort into open source when IBM wants to lock us in again sorry IBM good try that includes you oracle.
Now, for others that have invested time and effort into the system it's kinda slap in the face, and Fork You, I agree with Jesse.
Finlay, focusing on a failing ecosystem is not many are willing to risk, some of us saw this coming and moved away from that platform. Usual we can adapt and move from some transitional changes, yet this is big and stability that runs 90% of our services needs to be addressed by those with balls to prevent what this move would accomplish.
Respectfully ==Paul
64 • "best idea" ... (by Otis on 2020-12-25 19:38:01 GMT from United States)
@62 dang it BSD takes care of all that anxiety about systemd and the other bloaty-with-time worries as far as I can tell. GhostBSD and a few others are spearheading a charge into the face of The Enemy, making BSD palatable for those of us steeped in Linux as the only alternative to we know who.
65 • @36 unrealistic poll (by Dr. Dave on 2020-12-29 21:32:11 GMT from United States)
"CentOS currently gets over 500 hits per day here at DW"
Alright, let's assume the daily hit count actually means something..
Currently the poll indicates that 41% of respondents are CentOS users.
As of today, CentOS reports 526 daily hits.
The total number of hits for the Top 100 is 40587.
That means CentOS receives 1.3% of the Top 100's daily hits; a far cry from 41%.
As a comparison, the #1 position, MX Linux, has 3397 daily hits.
That means CentOS gets about 15% the amount of daily hits that MX Linux receives.
Given the recent news, I would expect a slightly higher concentration of CentOS users to have visited the poll, but not 30x the apparent level of interest indicated by daily hits.
Not that any of this matters. Like I said-- it's just a casual DW poll. Even if it were an official vote to choose a successor for CentOS, I wouldn't really care, because I have no interest in RedHat's family tree.
66 • CentOS (by azzorcist on 2020-12-30 02:15:23 GMT from Indonesia)
So basicly:
Fedora is sid.
CentOS is testing.
and RHEL is stable.
Prove that Debian development is right.
67 • @12 • And what about Oracle Linux? (by Microlinux (by zcatav on 2020-12-30 06:24:35 GMT from Turkey)
Debian has LTS and ExtendedLTS support:
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
68 • Byebye, CentOS... (by Hugo Santanna on 2020-12-30 13:53:45 GMT from Brazil)
My choice for a server?
☐ Fedora/CentOS Stream -- never, ever
☐ SLES/RHEL/Oracle Linux -- not for my taste
☑ Devuan -- it fulfils my needs: rock-solid stability
✅ OpenBSD -- a system like no other
...
By the way, I'm now migrating to the holy land of the BSDs (GhostBSD XFCE for desktop, OpenBSD for server). The only place where I still keep a Linux distro is a pendrive with the lightning-fast Porteus LXDE with a couple of additional modules.
And I wish a happy, wonderful, glorious 2021 for all of you who love the freedom of choice. To make the New Year a pleasant reality, keep protecting you and your families against the SARS-CoV-2. For God's sake, use mask permanently, avoid agglomeration, and TAKE THE VACCINE.
Remember the danger is out there, now more than ever...
69 • @ 65 Dr Dave´s number crunching (by Barnabyh on 2020-12-30 15:34:01 GMT from Germany)
Of course you´re right with your quick calculation. It is highly unlikely that 41% of Distrowatch readers are CentOS users, so the poll is swayed by people who have an interest in CentOS in the first place.
Happy New Year everybody.
70 • Stream is a blessing (by Ista on 2020-12-31 22:25:18 GMT from United States)
I understand the tight spot people who depended on CentOS are in, but really this is a blessing. Honestly what RHEL sells as "stability" is a euphemism for "old and busted". This move moves Centos to a position closer to that occupied by OpenSuse Leap; Enterprise foundation without software from the previous decade. That's a big upgrade in absolute terms, and the only thing you lost is RHEL compatibility.
Number of Comments: 70
Display mode: DWW Only • Comments Only • Both DWW and Comments
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| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
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| • Issue 1107 (2025-02-03): siduction 2024.1.0, timing tasks, Lomiri ported to postmarketOS, Alpine joins Open Collective, a new desktop for Linux called Orbitiny |
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| • Issue 1105 (2025-01-20): CentOS 10 Stream, old Flatpak bundles in software centres, Haiku ports Iceweasel, Oracle shows off debugging tools, rsync vulnerability patched |
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| • Issue 1102 (2024-12-23): Best distros of 2024, changing a process name, Fedora to expand Btrfs support and releases Asahi Remix 41, openSUSE patches out security sandbox and donations from Bottles while ending support for Leap 15.5 |
| • Issue 1101 (2024-12-16): GhostBSD 24.10.1, sending attachments from the command line, openSUSE shows off GPU assignment tool, UBports publishes security update, Murena launches its first tablet, Xfce 4.20 released |
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| • Issue 1096 (2024-11-11): Bazzite 40, Playtron OS Alpha 1, Tucana Linux 3.1, detecting Screen sessions, Redox imports COSMIC software centre, FreeBSD booting on the PinePhone Pro, LXQt supports Wayland window managers |
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Eridani Linux
Eridani Linux 6.3 was an updated and enhanced version of the downloadable release of Red Hat Linux 6.2 with all the updates and a number of extra applications and utilities. Eridani Linux 6.3 now also contains many updates and new features from Red Hat Linux 7.0, but retains the binary compatibility of the 6.x tree. If you're looking for an affordable copy of a Red Hat 6.2/7.0 hybrid and don't want the hassle of downloading the bug-fixes and security updates, look no further! It's also worth noting that Eridani Linux uses a stable compiler release, so there was no need to dig around for other compilers to compile your kernel.
Status: Discontinued
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