On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 4:21 AM Josh Boyer <jwboyer@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Competition in the Enterprise Linux space is a good thing. If a
> company or community other than Red Hat starts serving a market that
> RHEL can't, it forces Red Hat to evaluate and adjust. It keeps
> everyone pushing and developing solutions that hopefully benefit end
> users and customers. If everyone is fully participating in open
> source and upstream, it makes them all better inherently.
>
> > I've been using and promoting the Red Hat "(Enterprise) Linux" ecosystem
> > for more than two decades. But, who will I promote in the future if this
> > ecosystem becomes fragmented?
>
> Is it different from the non-Enterprise Linux ecosystem? What do you
> do there given the large variety of Linux distributions?
>
> My personal take on this is to think about what I use and why I use
> it. How does something solve my needs? Does it need to be better?
> etc.
>
> For example, long before I ever worked at Red Hat I was a Fedora Linux
> user. I love that project and distribution. I literally owe my
> career in some part to it. In recent years, I don't use Fedora
> heavily. Partly because of my day job, but also partly because my
> personal needs changed. I do still install almost every release in
> some way and try it out though. If someone asked me for a
> recommendation on a community Linux distribution, it would still be at
> the top of my list. Not because of what it was like in the past, but
> because of what Fedora is today which is far better than it ever has
> been.
>
> If someone asked me for a recommendation on an Enterprise Linux
> operating system, I'd say RHEL. Yes of course because I work on it,
> but also because I firmly believe it is the best on the market. It's
> what I run on my main machine every day. If someone asked for a
> community Enterprise Linux project, I'd suggest CentOS Stream because
> of the direct ties to RHEL, but also because I believe it's a
> relatively young and growing project with a lot of potential to do
> really interesting things. However, I would probably ask what their
> needs were and then I'd earnestly try to make a recommendation based
> on that.
>
Thank you for this response, Josh. I can sympathize with your love of
Fedora, and it is nice to see how you characterize CentOS Stream. I, too,
hope Stream evolves and grows into something that's not just a place for
contributions, but also something that draws users and encourages
innovation.
I am NOT a Red Hat employee (few things are more obvious than that). From
the outside, I don't know if inside Red Hat there is a culture at war with
itself, or if everybody is of one mind. That wouldn't mirror any free
software community I've seen, so I'd like to think there's some (hopefully)
healthy debate going on.
Right now I feel like CentOS Stream is not where it's "meant to be," and
nobody seems to be talking about exactly what that is. I know what I want
it to be, but I'm not sure the project itself has figured out its direction.
I'm thinking the downstreams that base on Stream will be doing the things
that users want and Stream itself isn't doing right now. That's everything
from the live media that AlmaLinux provides (a great thing!) to the
critical patches that Stream doesn't send to users in a timely manner.
I do want to thank all those Red Hat employees and other community members
who believe in free software and community distributions.
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
