Good news: Red Hat CTO talks about Red Hat’s future with IBM

So it looks like RH is staying independent and continue its amazing work for the open source community.

No need to switch over to Debian or any other distro, for now at least. But still I just recently started to migrate my Fedora-based workstations to CentOS 7. This might seem like an insane thing to do, but it makes sense perfectly.

In one of my previous posts I complained about how I hate updating and rebooting. Well guess what you need to do all the time with Fedora? And it gets worse: you have to do full system upgrade every 12 months, because that’s how long Fedora release gets updates. 12 months is nothing in my calendar.

So CentOS fits perfectly to my computing needs:

  • I want to keep my system very static and stable, no surprises
  • Long support (CentOS 7 gets updates until 2024)
  • Not crazy system-wide updates necessary every 12 months

I have to say that the migration wasn’t very easy, but a good evening or two worth of hard work. For example, I had to manually compile Emacs 26.2 because el7 repositories have some very old version (24.x). Even more work was to get mu4e up and running, because I had to compile new 8.x gcc for that. But still, nothing too crazy, and I expect this system to run now smoothly for the next five years.

My main motivation to the migration was several very annoying problems I encountered after the Fedora went to 5.0 and 5.1 kernels. It is so calming to stay now in the well tested 3.10 el7 kernel and most of the time I do out of habit “yum update”, there’s nothing. What a peace!