RHEL, Scientific Linux & CentOS: A sad story indeed

I love RedHat Linux. I think it is a beautiful piece of engineering. Hundreds of thousands of man hours spent ensuring systems that have packages installed keep running. Continuously.

One thing however that I have found is that my favorite RHEL clone for years, CentOS has been slacking. Bad.

For example, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 was released 10/11/2010, not bad, seeing as it’s previous version, RHEL5 was released 15/3/2007 – Three and a half years earlier. CentOS? Well, Version 6 of CentOS was released July 10. In the time that it took for CentOS to release their new fresh build of CentOS 6, RedHat had already released their first service pack/major update to RedHat, RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.1.

I must point out here, the fact that CentOS does not have 6.1 is not a security issue. Any security patches for RHEL have made their way to CentOS.

Scientific Linux on the other hand have been tracking the updates and new releases very well. They had their remix of RHEL released for public consumption on March 3 – not too much of a short wait. The fact that it is not a very faithful clone has scared me from moving to it, but with the long wait of CentOS 6.1, I am starting to think that it might just be time to change my mind and grow up!

One Comment “RHEL, Scientific Linux & CentOS: A sad story indeed”

  • Dean

    says:

    The problem with CentOS is its community is 100% leechers and 0% contributers. That said, the CentOS leadership have been very unfriendly in the past thereby alienating potential contributers.

    Debian is still by far the best.

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