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Alternative to Centos
Hello
I hope you are all well and safe.
With CentOS coming to an end in a couple of years, are there any other Linux distributions you would recommend other than Ubuntu and Fedora? Ones that would be supported with cPanel or Plesk for that matter (in the future).
Thanks
Comments
debian. thx.
Cloudlinx/AlmaLinux?
Or wait till CPanel changes price again and offers CPanel linux, starts charging you per inodes.
Isn't CloudLinx using CentOS?
They have their own flavor now. Based on rhel. Similar to ubuntu with Debian.
If you want to use latest hardware, I think Debian is your best choice.
Agree with you @seriesn. We're staying with the free CentOS fork called AlmaLinux and supported by CloudLinux. Owner Igor Seletskiy has budgeted 1 million per year to support AlmaLinux so it is securely funded.
Seletskiy has built a trustworthy reputation in the hosting community and, while being a multimillionaire, is very responsive to his customers, always answering personal emails within 48 hours. He trys to treat everyone with respect which is very rare today (he leaves you feeling like he's a friend).
Industry leaders like cPanel have also announced they are backing CloudLinux's AlmaLinux:
AlmaLinux rc1 is available now and Rocky Linux initial release ETA is in just 1-week. Both should be drop-in replacements.
Ubuntu, now and forever.
shhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don't give Oakley Capital any more ideas!
If I was using CentOS, I'd go with Alma, despite its dumb name.
Then again, Rocky Linux is a dumb name, too.
Only exception would be if I was a home user who was a RHEL admin at work and I wanted to train, etc. Then the free 16 licenses for RHEL is actually very attractive. I'm guessing that with a few mailinator accounts, you could in practice get unlimited RHEL licenses. But that would be wrong.
But of course, I use Debian and see no need for IBM Linux distributions.
They will disappoint you sooner/later. Trust me.
lmao
Ubuntu is the first distro (not OS) I used
Debian is the distro (not OS) I have used for the longest time
FreeBSD is the newest OS I am using
Advice: Use both of Debian and FreeBSD, depending on your tasks
If cPanel is your aim, Ubuntu is probably best for the future.
Otherwise, Debian - hands down. RHEL derivatives should be laid to rest forever more.
This will be interesting thing to watch over the next few months or years.
In my opinion, once the decision was made regarding CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream, I thought that might be the end of RHEL (RPM based) distributions in the web hosting world. I really thought the web hosting industry might start to embrace Debian or Ubuntu based distributions as a part of that. And cPanel has said they will support Ubuntu at some point and DirectAdmin already supports Debian (Ubuntu?).
But the feel is that one of these CentOS alternatives will win out. I'm not sure if that's just because of the shine of a new distribution or if people are just looking for a more "drop-in" replacement without having to relearn everything. But for the betterment of future-proofing, would moving to Debian/Ubuntu be a better move?
Admittedly... I was actually a critic of DirectAdmin supporting Debian and all of the operating systems they support. I would prefer that they stick to one distribution and do that well, rather than support every distribution under the sun. I still believe that. But have to admit, because they already supported other distributions, the news about CentOS 8 was less of an impact on them. Still the questions remains, will people actually switch to Debian based distribution on DirectAdmin or move to one of the RHEL/CentOS alternatives?
Are there other Debian based distributions that might be more server based?
Ubuntu has always seemed like a desktop distribution for me (it's what I use). But maybe it can work just as well in a server environment.
Debian always seemed like the grandfather branch. More like Fedora to Ubuntu's CentOS. I use to run Debian way back when - not saying it wasn't a polished product, but just seemed like it was there so that other distributions - like Ubuntu - could build off of it. I switched to Ubuntu because it seemed to have a larger community following and just seemed to remain in life longer than Debian. I also not sure how much Debian based Ubuntu is any more, since Ubuntu seems to have its own independent development now.
I started using Debian last month in the production environment, have used it previously in the testing environments, overall things look good and promising.
at this moment the Debian, Cloudlinx is great choice, soon: AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux
Here are the results of a poll we just did on this subject:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/poll-results-what-are-your-centos-plans/
RedHat offers licenses for 16 production servers for no cost through their developer program. So if you have less than 16 servers, you can go with RedHat as well.
My friend spent a career at IBM and is very cynical of how long those 16 servers will remain "free."
His analysis: "Yeah, "free" just long enough for you to grow dependent on IBM, and then they start adding "fees."
@WiredBlade so its possible to create multiple accounts and benefits from multiple free licenses right ?
What ? i like to abuse trials man
I started my Linux journey with Debian, and it has been a pleasant one except maybe for the whole systemd dramma; then again, some of you here would probably consider dramma added value.
The support cycle moves a bit faster than with RHEL/CentOS, but in-place major version upgrades are rather painless when it comes to the OS; you will still ofc need to carefully handle any custom packages/software, and make sure that upgrades like, for example, Apache httpd 2.2 -> 2.4 or PHP 5.x -> 7.x will work out fine for whatever it is you are hosting.
If you are looking to diversify or avoid further possible RedHat/IBM shennanigans, I can recommend Debian as a major stable distro which is not subject to one company's whims; I dare say it's also universally supported by providers. At the same time, be aware that there will be new things for you to learn, mainly when it comes to how things are organised, since, after all, the main point is that it has different origins to RHEL/CentOS.
To not feel like a complete shill, I will end the post by mentioning something wich I perceive as negative. I must admit that the recent change to the Debian homepage had me looking into BSDs (FreeBSD has a really nice handbook you can read online, btw) as a backup plan should Debian start taking a slow turn for the worse. Even though the change to he homepage will not bother 99% of you, I have become wary of people who are more interested in presenting themselves than they are interested in presenting their work.