covering the week's top tech stories with a slight linux bias if you enjoy your weekly tech news with a slight linux bias become part of our fleet choose your rank at patreon.com category five let's get into it debian officially supports the pine book pro that's coming up but first prepare to find your next distro centos sys admins there will not be a centos 9. for years centos has been a stable open source release based on and functionally compatible with red hat enterprise linux that all ended this week in what some users are calling a betrayal to the foss community when red hat announced it is severing support for centos and the centos team simultaneously said they're moving to a rolling release with their centos stream distro a user commented on the centos blog post saying this is dumb the entire premise and the only reason anyone uses centos is because it's a rebuilt red hat enterprise linux congratulations on undermining that nitwits the op received many plus ones for their spot on insight will this mean transitioning to a centos stream will the shift to a rolling release result in more admins looking at trusted alternatives such as ubuntu or debian red hat said in their announcement tuesday we believe that the real value of open source lies in innovating and solving problems and have learned that a rebuild or clone doesn't provide that opportunity are you a centos user do you feel betrayed by your trusted distro or are you excited to see what's next with a centos stream comment below updates for the centos linux 8 distribution will continue until the end of 2021 centos linux 7 users will thank the stars they chose the lts since support will continue until june 30th 2024 centos stream 9 will launch next summer i am not a red hat user um so it doesn't impact me uh but i know good for you but i can i can see how this would have a significant impact to just suddenly walk away now thankfully they're taking a year to transition but how do you just cut ties like that yeah and now i am i'm also not a red hat user centos user i'm very much a debian baby as our viewers know absolutely yeah i love debian and debian derives um but in this case now who does this impact i mean i've got customers who uh who do use centos i know some sysadmins who use centos and in fact my church uses centos as their email service um server okay and so it leaves them in a weird situation where okay you know hey i've been trying to transition them over to you know some some other service for some time but now it comes down to okay now the varied operating system the very distribution that you are using for your main server is no longer supported right and is being cut off and and all ties are being cut off from red hat so i mean it is really a burn um you know we're gonna see in the next coming months because uh you know a lot of stuff right now is what is the reaction of the user base and so some of the news comes from that reaction yeah so what's the response of the sysadmin well the response is like we feel betrayed right but the one thing and i do somewhat agree with the comment from from red hat is that you know the community is about advancing and growing and developing as opposed to just building off something that's older so i get why they want to make this movie i don't even know if that's the point it's more like centos is basically an alternative to yes red hat enterprise linux red hat enterprise linux of course requires the purchase of licensing yeah so does that come into play where well we don't really want to support the clone that everyone is using because we don't get paid for it again you know don't shoot the messenger i'm you know a lot of stuff right now it's very very fresh in the news comes from the reactionary response of the assisted men and and right now it feels like red hat has pulled the plug on something great and it's gonna hurt a lot of people and and not only like hurt but like it's really tough to suddenly have support yanked out from under you on a distribution that you've been using for 10 years and how easy and i say that kind of tongue-in-cheek how easy is it to walk away from that and switch to a new system like i think like for anybody who's using it i'm you know thinking your church they have to build a whole new system essentially like that's what simple here's the choice the choice becomes do we now transition to centos stream which is a rolling release which is what sent os that that was the appeal of centos is that it was not a rolling release yeah so now do we go to uh centos stream and become a rolling release or do we start looking at debian which is going to fall under that category ubuntu is very well supported by canonical so it opens up now now we need to start looking at okay well if if we're no longer going to be on this what we what we're going to call a stable release and what i mean by that is not not that anything else is unstable in the traditional sense but we've got two different release models yeah you've got that like here's a distro that you can install and it's just going to continue maintaining itself for years versus the rolling release cycle where you need to keep it up to date all the time you need to upgrade to the next distro or the next version of the distro and could have some breakage in the in the meantime yeah and so there's you know that that kind of support issue as well so do we start looking at other distros it'll be interesting to see and only tom's going to tell so i wonder too how much this might drive and not just the thought of moving to debian or moving to ubuntu but does this also drive us to think should we consider some of the cloud options i mean if the church says okay well our mail server is no longer supported so are we going to transition this old mail server to something new or are we just going to scrap it all together and say you know what let's just buy a nas and use that for file sharing and go with one of the cloud options for email that might be the better solution so i'm eager to hear your comments below i'd love to know how this affects you how it impacts you what your thoughts are do you fall on the side of the sysadmin who is kind of feeling betrayed right now by red hat and even so much as to say feeling betrayed by centos um or do you fall into the the camp where it's like okay well i'm gonna have transition to something and it's exciting and it's a chance to try something new and fresh where do you fall comment below love to hear from you on the coattail of ubuntu's announcement of official support for the raspberry pi 4 it seems debian doesn't want to be left out their next release contains a debian installer enhanced for arm devices with official support out of the box for among others the 200 pine book pro pro linux laptop from pine 64. an alpha version of the debian installer for buster successor bullseye has added support for the linux 5.9 kernel series and improvements to the rm64 architecture support along with outcome support for the new arm devices including not only pine 64's pine poke pro but also the original 99 pine book support has also been added for the friendly arms nano pi neo air and nano pi neo plus 2 as well as several other single board computers from a variety of manufacturers could we be starting to see the transition to an arm-based server room post your thoughts in the comments below we've still got a half a year left before debian 11 goes stable but bullseye is available now as debbie and testing so if you're particularly adventurous or just really want to get a debian powered pine book pro for christmas feel free to give it a try now becca raises an interesting point in that you know could this be the start of a transition in the server room we were talking about centos and the transition there but could this be the start of a transition not only to new distribution but also new architecture i think it could i mean i i have i have watched arm grow and gain more um user base in the last probably year it's been pretty significant it's happening quickly very quickly and so i'm very intrigued to see where this takes things because i do think arm could really become the new standard it's fast and it's cheap yeah and not only that but to think of all of the single board computers out there that are arm based i mean maybe there's still a hesitation to put at least to rely and depend on single board computing in the in the data center right and that there is some truth in that and and part of that comes from the reliability of storage so you think about a raspberry pi with an sd card well do you really want your entire infrastructure housed on an sd card probably not no but arm is a lot more than just single board computers and it's not limited to sd cards you look at things from you know boards from odroid you look at boards from pine 64 and other competitors to raspberry pi and they all support emmc yeah and in fact a lot of them from both of those manufacturers and a lot of other manufacturers are supporting um m.2 yes so you can stick an nvme drive on your single board computer yeah and now you're running like something that is screaming fast super super fast super reliable and uh that belongs in the data center if you ask me i completely agree and i mean right now you know in my day job we're dealing with servers and you know all this kind of stuff and one of the things we've been talking about lately is getting our own server and so what you know with this story makes me think are we at the point where we could run uh you know take like a hosting server or you know you know a cloud server and run it off you know a rock pro 64 or something sure why not where you've got it hooked up to you know a whole bunch of terabyte hard drives through usb or something for the storage space but that not even usb like i think well and it has usb 3 but think about um iscsi yeah sure right good example um but the data center isn't i mean sbcs flip the economics of the whole situation on its head because rather than having one intel server with two xeon processors and 32 cores and and which are like gigs of ram power hogs and super expensive yeah rather than having one of those to do 10 different things you just have 10 single board computers doing those 10 different things and your cost not only up front goes way down but your cost ongoing for the you know the actual power that you're using the heat that you're generating and the noise from those big old servers i mean it's really flipping it on its head but keep in mind mac apple are actually pushing their macbook pros and the macbook air and yes and their mac lineup of hardware into the arm architecture as well that's right run processors so we're really you know it's not just single board computer hobbyist stuff anymore we're talking max yeah which is huge and if we're talking max which are you know they have that kind of aura about them of being an innovative company and they push trends and and and they kind of shift the industry in in so many ways um when are we going to start seeing real good solid servers like 1u 2u3u servers that we can stick in our server rack in place of those intel equivalents that absolutely happen well we want to hear your thoughts let us know would you use an arm based single board computer to run your server where do you think this is going to take things let us know comment below send us in your thoughts don't miss the other stories we're following this week first the eu is pushing for home workers to have the right to disconnect plus scientists have created a plane that flies without fuel subscribe to our youtube channel to make sure you catch the full stories from the category 5 dot tv newsroom i'm becca ferguson thanks for watching [Music] you