So then, fellow nerds, dweebs, and geeks...

What do you think about CentOS being converted from a downstream stable version of RHE into an upstream Beta version? How about 8 years of promised support for v8 being unceremoniously thrown on the shit-pile? (new EOL is 2021)

Personally, I favor stability and security over everything else, so I am still on the v7 line. I have never done an upgrade to a new version release until it has reached at least x.3 or x.4 in point releases. In fact, I just rebuilt the last of my v6 machines a mere 2 weeks ago due to them finally reaching end of life. I converted them to v7, which will not EOL until 2024. My main reason for this is that cPanel is my primary hosting platform and it STILL isn't stable on CentOS 8 Linux yet. I think they knew/suspected this was coming, as they have already announced that they will not be supporting CentOS 8 Stream

Were any of you already on v8? What are your plans? I'm watching the new Rocky project as well as the announcement by CloudLinux that a free version is forthcoming.

We had just started standing up new hosts with CentOS 8 at my organization when this news hit, so we've only got a few, and all dev and testing boxes to get a feel for the new system. Like your environment, our datacenters are currently running ~88% CentOS 7 with a smattering of old 6 boxes where migration has stalled due to ancient software that clients refuse to get off of.

Frankly, considering RedHat's history (even before IBM got their claws in), with the entire systemd Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers insanity, this announcement didn't come as much of a surprise to me. It's something that RedHat would do because for the last several years they've been generally unfeeling towards their users, and it's DEFINITELY something IBM would do.

Our path forward isn't very clear as yet. I'm one of five system admins maintaining a mix of Linux, Solaris, and for some god-awful reason, still HP-UX, and we've been talking about it amongst ourselves. At the moment the stopgap might be Debian stable, as it's the OS that a fair number of us have some familiarity with. All our ERP and production database stuff runs on OEL with ULN patches anyway, so if we had to do a fairly quick (less than six months), jump, would it be a little painful? Absolutely. Would it kill our day-to-day operations? Not even close. So we're not worrying ourselves silly with it just yet, and as you pointed out, for the majority of our stuff, we're supported until 2024, unless CentOS, RedHat, and IBM decide to stab the community in the back with that EOL date too.

Way back in 1999, I witnessed a RedHat box, configured as an extra qmail pop3 node, take down an entire ISP's Solaris qmail system by locking up the NFS completely. From them on I was solidly SuSE / openSUSE, on my own machines here and at the datacentre. However Suse seemed to finally lose its way around or just after the 42 Leap release, something very standard (might have been NFS config) was badly broken in that version's YaST. So am now solidly Ubuntu.

The dungeon server here which holds our entire music collection and also deals with auto rcync uploading new scenes to the main websever, it was a venerable SuSE 10 box installed about 2004 (internal network only, no port forwarding, different firewalled network to our wi-fi, so seemed no point upgrading), running on hardware from 99-ish with an actuial Pentium processor. That's just been replaced by an i7 powered Proxmox host on which a Ubuntu 20.04 VM does the dungeon server role.

At $dayjob we do have a bunch of cPanel servers on CentOS, and there were plans to do a major upgrade, that'll definitely be on hold for the time being.

For a long time I disliked Debian, but Ubuntu seems rock solid, though the first thing you have to do on installing a new box is

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

to make vi (in this case, vim.tiny) the default editor. Nano? Noooo!

Not a fan of Debian or it's bastard stepchildren. Everything is in the wrong place. It's an unholy distro. Was forced to use it back in the day mining shitcoins because the easy-to-use, preconfigured mining image was built on Ubuntu. Hated it. Loved the money though.

One of my biggest issues is all that su/sudo bullshit. I rarely allow user shells on machines here and privilege elevation is absolutely insane. Who the hell though that was a good idea? I am root. I am god. I do what I want, went I want. End of discussion.

BTW, if Rocky takes off and someone in the community doesn't rename a major package in the LAMP stack "Bullwinkle", I'm gonna be seriously pissed and disappointed.