Huh, it's as if something happened that made people not like CentOS so much
- Reference: 1626264068
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/07/14/ubuntu_openstack/
- Source link:
The finding came from the [1]2020 OpenStack User Survey , organised by the Open Infrastructure Foundation, which queries respondents on a variety of topics, including the main operating system used for their OpenStack cloud deployments.
The 2020 survey [2]kicked off after [3]IBM's $34bn purchase of Red Hat , and closed before Red Hat confirmed the community build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), known as CentOS, would morph into [4]CentOS Stream . The change to something perceived as not fit for a production environment left the knickers of many developers ever so twisted.
[5]
CentOS had ruled the roost in recent years, accounting for 39 per cent of respondents compared to Ubuntu's 35 per cent in 2018. CentOS actually increased its share to 40 per cent in 2019 (Ubuntu remained second, at 35 per cent), but it was all-change at the top in 2020 as Ubuntu rose to a 40 per cent share and CentOS slumped to 28 per cent.
[6]
[7]
The blow may have been softened somewhat by the growth in RHEL's share from 15 per cent in 2019 to 19 per cent in 2020.
[8]CentOS Stream: 'I was slow on the uptake, but I get what they are doing now,' says Rocky Linux founder
[9]Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest
[10]Latest patches show Rust for Linux project making great strides towards the kernel
[11]Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices
However, while Canonical was quick to brag about its contributions to the foundation and its attempts to deal with the pain of installing and updating OpenStack, the loss of the top spot for CentOS perhaps speaks more to the woes of the distribution even before Red Hat's move.
One senior figure in the open-source community who asked to remain anonymous told The Reg : "OpenStack is dying," and highlighted the move to Kubernetes in the IBM and Red Hat world as a contributing factor for the relegation of CentOS in the survey.
There was also a decline in Kubernetes usage (from 72 per cent in 2019 to 66 per cent in 2020) in favour of rolling one's own or OpenShift when it came to containers or Platform-as-a-Service tools for application management.
[12]
Igor Seletskiy, CEO of CloudLinux and the AlmaLinux Foundation, agreed that Kubernetes was indeed a factor, telling us that Red Hat and IBM were "moving away from OpenStack" in favour of OpenShift and Kubernetes. "There is going to be very limited out-of-the-box for OpenStack," he went on, "We are looking forward to Kubernetes-like environments or other virtualisation environments that don't involve OpenStack itself," he said.
The backing away of Red Hat and IBM is clear in the figures for CentOS even if RHEL has enjoyed a slight surge.
We asked the Open Infrastructure Foundation why it thought CentOS had taken such a dive, and a spokesperson highlighted a more-than halving of respondents (down from 400 in 2019 to 197 in 2020) to the OS question as a factor and suggested that perhaps the latest survey had been promoted more to Canonical customers.
[13]
"Unfortunately," the spokesperson added, "there's not a clearer reason beyond that."
OpenStack users can have a crack at [14]the 2021 survey right now . ®
Get our [15]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.openstack.org/analytics/
[2] https://superuser.openstack.org/articles/operate-openstack-take-the-survey-heres-why-it-matters/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2018/10/28/ibm_redhat_acquisition/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YO8KHPF075NTX27lKzt8EgAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YO8KHPF075NTX27lKzt8EgAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YO8KHPF075NTX27lKzt8EgAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/09/centos_stream_greg_kurtzer/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/08/linux_foundation_t_shirt/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/05/rust_for_linux_kernel_project/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/02/rocky_linux_80000_downloads/
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YO8KHPF075NTX27lKzt8EgAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YO8KHPF075NTX27lKzt8EgAAAEk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.openstack.org/user-survey/survey-2021/landing?BackURL=/user-survey/survey-2021/
[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Too much choice?
As a big Linux fan, I have to (regretfully) ask if there's just too much choice out there in the Linux world?
Sure...the Windows mono-culture is a pain in the ass.....I left that nightmare twenty years ago. But do we really need umpty-ump desktop distributions?....Umpty-ump server distributions?.....endless arguments about the meaning of the word "free"? .....warfare about the difference between licences (you know GPL2, GPL3, Apache, MIT.......and on and on).
Can't we get real? Maybe four or five desktop distributions (RHEL, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, elementary)? A similar (small) selection of server distributions?
I don't even mind if MY FAVOURITES don't make the cut!!
Re: Too much choice?
There are too many standards, lets make one standard to rule them all...
https://m.xkcd.com/927/
There are only really a handful of package management options, and that, as much as anything else, defines a distribution.
Re: Too much choice?
There are three packaging solutons: tgz/git/build from source - Gentoo/Arch/LFS - .deb - Debian and Ubuntu and derivatives - .rpm - Fedora/RHEL and clones, and SUSE.
Apt wins dependency management for packages, I think but the others don't always have as many packages to care about anyway.
Of these for third party packages: .rpm is good for some third party commercial packages too but .deb and the Debian package universe has more or less won everything else.. [See, for example, the relative pain of producing a full bootstrap and rebuild of Rocky/Almalinux onto an ARM system like Raspberry Pi.]
Add in the horror of Red Hat subscription/license entitlement and .rpm is likely to die out in the long term, IMHO.
Re: Too much choice?
apk also exists, but is pretty niche... so I am not surprised you didn't mention it.
I wasn't sure what other solutions exist, but rpm/deb/source does seem to cover the vast majority
Re: Too much choice?
I've been using Linux for slightly longer, but I don't mind the large number of choices. Niche things that scratch itches seem to be a good thing, overall, and show that the environment is still growing and viable. And cutting out "choice" would likely make things worse - witness the current systemd mess that all of the distros (ie - the decision-makers about this kind of stuff) jumped on with both feet, without even giving sysvinit a goodbye kiss. I understand your sentiment about narrowing things down, but I don't know that I'd trust most of the distros to do it "right".
Re: Too much choice?
Normally I would absolutely say yes. Fragmentation is a problem with open-source.
However, imagine if CentOS was one of the only choices and it just shat on us ;)
Turns out, choice (of lifeboat) is good when abandoning sinking ships.
Not exactly a surprise.
So yeah. I don't use OpenStack, but I do have a few servers that I needed to upgrade last year, mostly because I want to avoid "the cloud" aka somebody else's computer. I'd been running CentOS, but when I started testing CentOS 8, I discovered that it was absolutely awful. Ok, fine, 7 is still supported for a few years, I'll just use that, it's workable and maybe they'll get their shit together.
Then the stream thing got announced. Big NOPE from me, these things need to run for years with nothing but security updates, I'm trying to keep my pain in the ass level low.
And now those servers are running Xubuntu. Yes, with a GUI, my servers have GUIs, because sometimes it's easier to do things with a few clicks, sometimes it's easier to type stuff, and so I do both things. No, they don't boot into wtf-ever they're calling runlevel 5 these days, but if I type startx I want that GUI there, and XFCE is a LOT nicer than the current Gnome horribleness.
I'm not surprised at all that Red Hat is getting ditched. Now that Rocky Linux is a thing I could go there, but why? It's still got the Red Hat 8 awfulness where things just seem to be broken at random. The only way I'd use it now is if I had some specific project that didn't work on Xubuntu.
Re: Not exactly a surprise.
I too am holding off on 8, and sticking with 7 for my new development machine. Still got 3 years to see how things develop.
Bailing out of Centos to a RHEL Developer subscription.
[1]https://developers.redhat.com/articles/getting-red-hat-developer-subscription-what-rhel-users-need-know#
[1] https://developers.redhat.com/articles/getting-red-hat-developer-subscription-what-rhel-users-need-know#
Re: Not exactly a surprise.
A note from IRC last night: for 7, some CVEs are already being marked as WONTFIX ... 7 is on "last few years" support now.
Not all CVEs are created equal, but you'd hope that they'd all be patched in a distribution where you pay significant $$$ for support
Re: Not exactly a surprise.
Do you have a link or CVE #?
Re: Not exactly a surprise.
... and XFCE is a LOT nicer than the current Gnome horribleness.
Maybe, for the time being.
But the forecast is rather gloomy.
With the jump to [1]4.16 and CSDs you may be in for some of that Gnome stuff you make an undeservedly polite reference to.
No way I will upgrade my box to Xfce 4.16, I'll pin 4.12 till I find something else that suits me.
O.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5442430/
This might reduce the chafing
A most places where I've worked since both distributions have been around, the people who choose what to put on servers have picked something from the Red Hat family, and the developers have mostly chosen from the Debian family, which has occasionally brought slight incompatibilities to light.
It's obvoius.
"We asked the Open Infrastructure Foundation why it thought CentOS had taken such a dive,"
Well, if you shit on someone from a great height then don't be surprised if they move.