From my personal, outsider, view the ‘Distribution’ thing is a major bottleneck with the long term stability of Linux. Distributions dilute the focus on maintenence by dividing the available labour resource over a foolish duplication of tasks. This is usually a marketing thing of some kind (ie: Oracle Redhat fork, Ubuntu vs. Debian, Slack vs. Gentoo, CentOS vs. Redhat).

If all the people who are maintainers, globally, held thier noses a bit and actually came together on a single distro there would be more hands on.
I know, one can appreciate that eveyone wants a custom OS for their own purposes and this drives people to fork.
If there was more focus on the generics of system building, package selection, and optimized kernel driver boiler-plate, there would be no need for so many distributions. People could just set up builds of predefined package compilations against the master public distribution.

The issues seen today with distributions are the same issues seen early in the history of UNIX where everyone had a different  proprietary version and nobody’s soiftware worked with anyone else’s distro.

Resolution of real technical issues now seems to get lost in the noise of endless discussions of distribution religion.
 
I normally sign on to mail lists to resolve a problematic technical issue.
What I am seeing on mailing lists, in general (not just this one), is a marked decline of useful technical feedback to the point where: 

religion = ~100%
technical support = ~0%

So the war over distributions becomes the elephant in the room while the effectiveness of the actual software begins to decline as a result.

Oracle is in competition with IBM in the database market. In my opinion, neither of those organizations should be managing a distribution due to the inherent conflicts of interest involved with respect to the user community at large; Unless they can disengage personal corporate interests from the process, which is doubtful and historically never happened.


> On Feb 2, 2020, at 2:26 AM, Stephan Wiesand <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On 31. Jan 2020, at 19:10, Jon Pruente <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> 
>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 7:58 PM Yasha Karant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> soon to be forced to go to another Linux.  The options appear to be drop 
>> EL entirely and go to Ubuntu  LTS ("stable") current, or to stay with EL 
>> and use Springdale (Princeton) EL8 when (if?) it is available, or Oracle 
>> 8 EL.  Thus far, everyone I have contacted who did a clean install of 
>> 
>> Is there a reason you have to avoid CentOS? The SL devs have stated that they will not develop SL8 and instead put their resources into CentOS. 
> 
> I hate to say this, but CentOS is pretty slow these days getting out daily updates, minor releases and corresponding SRPMs. No distinction between security errata and other ones either. SL has been doing better. OL is doing better, including release 8.