Hi all, maybe you already have heard it, CentOS is basically dead now. It used to be an exact RHEL clone, but now it's kind of an RHEL beta [1].
Now what does that have to do with Debian? When we look into why people use CentOS, the reason is pretty simple: it is (or was) binary-compatible with RHEL, just without the support [2]. I was reading comments from people that use RHEL on their production, but CentOS at home or for testing, because you don't need to pay for it. These use cases now don't work anymore, forcing them into either paying for RHEL, or moving to a different ecosystem. The more I started thinking about it, the more I wondered about why Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS are *not* binary-compatible. It just doesn't make sense to me. Both Debian Stable and Ubuntu LTS provide a more "long term" approach than let's say Fedora. And while Ubuntu LTS is based on Debian, it is not based on Debian Stable, even though they have release cycle of two years. It would seem kinda obvious that Debian and Ubuntu have a common freeze period and work on LTS maintenance together. Does anyone know why this is not the case? I suspect some historical reasons, but I couldn't find anything quickly. - Stephan [1] https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/ [2] It's easy to find comments on various blogs or social media, but for sake of completeness let me just mention that CERN [3], [4]. [3] https://linux.web.cern.ch/centos/ [4] https://linux.web.cern.ch/other/
