I have some legacy linux servers that need an update to a new OS. Is Debian 8 a good choice? All I care about is that stuff just works for as many years as possible, gets security updates and does not break.
Debian is really well-made, we've used it at my college to host a yearly programming competition since 2012, it's stable, quick, and rather simple to maintain, especially if you're not doing anything too complex, other than hosting a couple of PHP files on top of a web server, that's the full scope of what we've done. I am not a security expert so that I couldn't answer on, we've not yet had any breaches yet, despite all the major things that came out last year or so, 'Heartbleed', and 'Shell Shock'. I think the best option for you is to try it out on one machine maybe via LiveCD and see how you like or don't like it.
Because FreeBSD has really good community support and great documentation, while Debian kFreeBSD is a tiny community. And I really do not see the point - the GNU userspace is mostly available in ports if you want it on freebsd, but the FreeBSD userspace is generally as good.
It's an interesting port, but things don't just work. There's a lot of fiddling around when parts of the system expect gnu utilities that aren't available on FreeBSD, and the BSD utilities work differently. Ifconfig for example does the same job, but in different ways, so stories won't work, etc.
"Finally, the Debian ports to the FreeBSD kernel, kfreebsd-amd64 and kfreebsd-i386, included as technology previews in Debian 6.0 and Debian 7, are not part of this release."[0]
This is incorrect. stable releases are supported until one year after the new stable release, which happens to be ~3 years, so it's 2018 for jessie. If LTS project also decides to support it, it extends to 2020.
Please be aware that with Ubuntu LTS, only the small number of packages in "main" gets support for the full LTS time-frame, while the majority of packages in "universe" gets no official support after the 18 months (?) of a regular release time-frame.
So in practice you don't get a larger number of supported packages than with RHEL/CentOS.
Wow, really? That's nothing! No security updates after that?
> Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019
That sounds more reasonable. But still a bit short.
> RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos).
Interesting. Now I understand why I hear "centos" so often lately. So far, I only know Debian based distros. I wonder how much work it would be to switch to one of these two.
There was an article complaining on how RHEL support a flavor of python that is very old but it doesn't work with any other popular python libraries. (update: RHEL 5 and below is stuck with Python 2.4 apparently)
Long term support is great and all but Red Hat can only support so much, the libraries and any other ecosystem that is part of that software or programming language will be dropped by group that are responsible for it. That was my take away from the post/user comments.
In general Debian is pretty rock solid imo and as a good system admin you should stay a version or two behind and you should be pretty set imo. Waiting until 2024 is crazy in term of updates and such, I rather go OpenBSD route if you want to go that long.
It's hard to blame RH for that. Last time I checked, 2.5 was just released a few months before the first release of RHEL 5. Now they have software collections (https://www.softwarecollections.org) as a workaround, providing optional newer components.
I agree Red Hat is hardly the guilty one. I mean, RHEL based distros have a lot of plumbing and utilities written in Python, so it is unacceptable to upgrade system Python. Now, notice it's the system Python, the main reason of Python's existence in RHEL is the system utilities written in Python, providing Python language to customers is secondary to that. So there's no wonder nobody wants to touch it for reasons other than patching security issues, and users who try to run all the shiny Python libraries and frameworks using it should be banned from using Python ever again :) Just use a newer version for god's sake (and it's not that there isn't a dozen different way of getting a newer version).
(That being said, if obsolete version in RHEL fits the purpose of the user, that's great, and there is no reason for getting a new version, but it's wrong for those people to pressure developers for supporting old versions, and it's immoral for foss developers to continue supporting 10 year old releases at the expense of holding back progress. there was a post regarding that point lately, I'll try to find the link)
Yes, the problem is mostly with the users. The last time I was using CentOS 5 there were alternate repositories (e.g. IUS) providing non-conflicting newer versions of stuff. Alternatively, there's always pkgsrc.
I'm not sure if you're implying that 6 months is too long or just providing more info. I don't think it is too long given that most distributions have stabilization periods where no new versions will be accepted e.g. Debian 8 was frozen on November 5 last year.
> Wow, really? That's nothing! No security updates after that?
First of all, it's 2018, not 2017. For the latter point, there is now a LTS project, which provides +2 year after offical support ends, but they only support squeeze for now (since wheezy is on offical support and jessie is not released) and AFAIK it's not decided yet if jessie will be supported by LTS or not. So it may extend to 2020.
If you want certainty on this regard Ubuntu LTS is also a pretty good choice.
On CentOS, I don't use it so I can't comment on it in depth, but beware that number of offically supported packages are much smaller compared to Debian, so make sure the packages you want to use are supported. (There are semi-offical/unoffical repositories, but they may not be maintained as well as offical packages.) (Actually that same point applies to Ubuntu also, as only main and restricted archives are supported by Canonical and universe/multiverse is where big number of packages reside in.)
What are your servers running now? Is there an upgrade path from whatever Linux it is? Do you have a lot of custom configurations?
Debian is widely regarded and typically provides two to three years update support for a given code name (e.g. Wheezy or Jessie). There is a proposal for providing Long Term Support (LTS) for Wheezy as has been done for Squeeze.
I really don't have any custom needs. Any old linux distro will do.
But only 2 to 3 years? That is very short. What would be a good alternative with longer support? There must be market for it I guess. Don't companies simply want to run their stuff as long as possible? Many companies still use Windows XP. And that's 14 years old.
Any major distris that commit to 10 years of support or something?
Yes, RHEL has 10 year support periods. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is commercial - you pay an annual subscription for updates.
CentOS/Scientific Linux/Springdale Linux are free clones with free updates. Oracle Linux is a free download, but not sure how updates work. Current is version 7 with support until 2024.
PS: if you are asking this kind of question here, you might want to take your local Linux sysadmin for coffee and explain your use cases, applications, hardware spec and likely traffic in detail.
