Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

eddiener · Post by **eddiener** » 2019/10/04 04:26:06

I am going to stop using CentOS for my programming needs. When you design an installation program which does not allow the user to specify in what partitions of a user's hard drive various mount points should be mounted and in what place the boot code should go, then CentOS has lost a user like me. If I can not install it I can not use it.

I would like to thank CentOS for designing a very useful and solid operating system, which is free for the end-user. I would also like to thank others who have helped me on these forums. I am truly sorry CentOS has taken the turn it has, but I have seen much other badly designed and crippled software in my career and, being a software developer myself, I have seen first hand how developers often have little understanding of what an end-user wants from the software they create. Nonetheless I wish CentOS the best even if I will no longer be using it.

Good-bye and good luck to everyone.

schadfield · Post by **schadfield** » 2019/10/04 08:07:42

I didn't notice any difference between installing 8 compared to 7.

nouvo09 · Post by **nouvo09** » 2019/10/04 11:01:08

Hi

are you seriously in good health ? Because I'm a Centos user since the beginninf of version 5 and I can't figure out what you are talking of.

jlehtone · Post by **jlehtone** » 2019/10/04 11:51:17

CentOS has taken no turns. CentOS has not designed anything questionable. CentOS is 100% bug for bug compatible with RHEL.

If someone has taken a turn in design, then that someone is Red Hat.

tunk · Post by **tunk** » 2019/10/04 12:10:55

My (brief) impression is the opposite:
I did a test installation a couple of days ago where I put the swap
partition at the beginning of the disk without problem. I seem to
remember that on CentOS 7 the partitions was moved around by
the installer.

eddiener · Post by **eddiener** » 2019/10/05 15:28:14

I could not figure out in the installer how to specify an existing partition as a mount point, so I thought this was impossible to do. Someone else has answered my question of how to do this at viewtopic.php?f=54&t=71921&p=302369#p302369. I am sure the installation program changed from the last time I installed CentOS from scratch ( probably CentOS7 ), but I do apologize for thinking that such a basic operation as choosing existing partitions for mount points could not be done in the installation program.

I still do not see in the installation program how I specify that the CentOS8 boot code should go in the partition on which I have mounted /boot rather than in the boot area at the beginning of my first hard drive, so if someone knows how to do this I would appreciate a response.

There is also the bug in the net installation program where attempting to specify the network installation does not automatically pick up any repository URLs no matter what you do. I understand that this bug has been acknowledged in other posts, and I have found a URL I can use, but still such a bug, along with my difficulty specifying mount points and the boot code partition, led me to believe that CentOS8 had gone off course in using an installation program in which I could not install the OS. I am obviously not a big fan of Anaconda in its current iteration.

desertcat · Post by **desertcat** » 2019/10/05 22:03:36

eddiener wrote: ↑
2019/10/05 15:28:14
I could not figure out in the installer how to specify an existing partition as a mount point, so I thought this was impossible to do. Someone else has answered my question of how to do this at viewtopic.php?f=54&t=71921&p=302369#p302369. I am sure the installation program changed from the last time I installed CentOS from scratch ( probably CentOS7 ), but I do apologize for thinking that such a basic operation as choosing existing partitions for mount points could not be done in the installation program.

I still do not see in the installation program how I specify that the CentOS8 boot code should go in the partition on which I have mounted /boot rather than in the boot area at the beginning of my first hard drive, so if someone knows how to do this I would appreciate a response.

There is also the bug in the net installation program where attempting to specify the network installation does not automatically pick up any repository URLs no matter what you do. I understand that this bug has been acknowledged in other posts, and I have found a URL I can use, but still such a bug, along with my difficulty specifying mount points and the boot code partition, led me to believe that CentOS8 had gone off course in using an installation program in which I could not install the OS. I am obviously not a big fan of Anaconda in its current iteration.

No the current cursed installation method started with CentOS 7, it took me 2 days of hacking to figure it out. Once you learn the HowTo of CentOS installation it becomes a piece of cake, and you can zip right through it. I am a dinosaur and still use CUSTOM Partitioning, rather than LVM -- there are some good things and some bad things about each method.

I have not installed CentOS 8.0 as I have learned from too much hair pulling that ALL Xyz.0 installs are bug infested, programs that once ran no longer run... or are simply totally missing, etc. CentOS 7.0 was the last straw for me -- why I thought it would be "different this time" I have no idea. If I decide to visit "The Dark Side" this time around it will be purely to "kick the tires", with a concerted effort at migration when CentOS 8.1 or 8.2 comes out. It is nice to know that the installer for 8.0 is still the same as it was for CentOS 7.

See you on the flip side.

eddiener · Post by **eddiener** » 2019/10/10 07:56:42

desertcat wrote: ↑
2019/10/05 22:03:36

eddiener wrote: ↑
2019/10/05 15:28:14
I could not figure out in the installer how to specify an existing partition as a mount point, so I thought this was impossible to do. Someone else has answered my question of how to do this at viewtopic.php?f=54&t=71921&p=302369#p302369. I am sure the installation program changed from the last time I installed CentOS from scratch ( probably CentOS7 ), but I do apologize for thinking that such a basic operation as choosing existing partitions for mount points could not be done in the installation program.

I still do not see in the installation program how I specify that the CentOS8 boot code should go in the partition on which I have mounted /boot rather than in the boot area at the beginning of my first hard drive, so if someone knows how to do this I would appreciate a response.

There is also the bug in the net installation program where attempting to specify the network installation does not automatically pick up any repository URLs no matter what you do. I understand that this bug has been acknowledged in other posts, and I have found a URL I can use, but still such a bug, along with my difficulty specifying mount points and the boot code partition, led me to believe that CentOS8 had gone off course in using an installation program in which I could not install the OS. I am obviously not a big fan of Anaconda in its current iteration.
No the current cursed installation method started with CentOS 7, it took me 2 days of hacking to figure it out. Once you learn the HowTo of CentOS installation it becomes a piece of cake, and you can zip right through it. I am a dinosaur and still use CUSTOM Partitioning, rather than LVM -- there are some good things and some bad things about each method.

I have not installed CentOS 8.0 as I have learned from too much hair pulling that ALL Xyz.0 installs are bug infested, programs that once ran no longer run... or are simply totally missing, etc. CentOS 7.0 was the last straw for me -- why I thought it would be "different this time" I have no idea. If I decide to visit "The Dark Side" this time around it will be purely to "kick the tires", with a concerted effort at migration when CentOS 8.1 or 8.2 comes out. It is nice to know that the installer for 8.0 is still the same as it was for CentOS 7.

See you on the flip side.

Beyond the difficulties in installing CentOS8, which I was finally able to accomplish with the kind help of other CentOS8 users, I have discovered that CentOS8, at least at this juncture, has no graphical package manager. In CentOS7 I used yumex, which was decent enough to work without crashing, but all yumex and yumex-dnf stopped a couple of years ago, and evidently there is no port of dnfdragora, which runs on Fedora, to CentOS8. So the only graphical software installation tool that CentOS8 has is the very simple Software application, which can not deal with dnf packages at the package level at all. Evidently the CentOS8, or the corresponding RHEL8, developers feel that if you want to deal with dnf you should know how to use it at the command line level and no graphical package manager is needed. So for me, as expressed in my OP, I will put CentOS8 on the back burner and if it ever advances to some further, better, 8.n release, and I can figure out how to upgrade to such a release from within it, I will look at it again.

Thanks for your input. At this point CentOS8 is for Linux gurus at a certain level and not for a user like me who likes ease of use.

nouvo09 · Post by **nouvo09** » 2019/10/10 09:50:36

It's for adults only.

BShT · Post by **BShT** » 2019/10/10 12:52:58

/boot problem can be related with /boot/efi

CentOS 8 is a little crude as a desktop OS (even as a server, no awstat, buggy nagios check_disk) but i´m using it without problem

CentOS

Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

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Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS

Re: Leaving CentOS as a viable OS