Re: [PLUG] Lab recommendations

[brent timothy saner via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On 5/10/21 14:48, Keith C. Perry via plug wrote:
> Brent,
> 
> Just to satisfy my own curiosity.  How would you compare something like Debian-testing or Ubuntu's non LTS releases to CentOS now?  Would you consider it more "bleeding edge" or less.  I'm Ubuntu guy but have used CentOS when forced too.  I'm not big on rolling releases (I don't think I've been in my Arch partition in over a year now) but kind of like the idea of something in the middle.
> 

I haven't used .DEB-based distros in a hot minute, but as I understand
it this is how it breaks down:


Debian Sid ("Unstable")[0] is closer to Arch or Gentoo. Its packages
more closely follow upstream. It's kind of basically just a staging area
for Debian Testing - making sure nothing breaks *hard*, a place to make
sure the package builds okay on all supported architectures, etc.
Occasionally you'll see one or two RCs from upstream if they fix a
particularly nasty bug or exploit and it hasn't been backported yet.

There is no direct official Ubuntu equivalent; you'd install a "daily-"
release.

The RedHat equivalent is installing CentOS Stream and enabling the
Experimental repositories.



Debian Testing[2] is where a large part of the interoperability, QA,
etc. is done in Debian. This depends on the maintainer and how many
tests must pass, so a package version may be in limbo here for a while
or it may be done quickly.

There is no direct Ubuntu equivalent to my knowledge.

The RedHat equivalent is CentOS Stream.



Debian Stable[3] is finally the "cleared" package versions.

Ubuntu releases correspond to this.

RHEL releases (but after 8.x, not CentOS releases) correspond to this.



Debian and Ubuntu have an *additional* release type, LTS. RHEL/CentOS
does not have an equivalent - instead, RHEL (and previously CentOS[4])
has a much longer lifetime for each release than non-LTS Debian/Ubuntu
releases. (So I suppose you could say "*every* RHEL release is LTS"...)

The closest analogue RHEL has to LTS releases are ELS (Extended Life
Support)[5] Add-Ons, but those can be applied to any release and is not
tied to a specific release.



[0] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUnstable
[1] http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting
[3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianStable
[4] Worth noting that as part of the CentOS Stream transition strategy,
the lifetime of CentOS 8.x was *severely* shortened compared to its
previous releases and compared to the RHEL branch equivalent.
[5]
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#Extended_Life_Cycle_Phase
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