My two cents on distros to teach students (changed the subject line) On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 9:35 AM rusty carruth via PLUG-discuss wrote: > ... snip ... > First, why I have an opinion: I sometimes teach a course on Linux at a > local community college in the Phoenix Metro area. My course uses - > well, used - CentOS 7, OpenSuSE (I forget which version), and Ubuntu as > the distributions the students are required to install (in usually > using VirtualBox). > > I'm using CentOS to give the students experience in what is extremely > close to RedHat, Ubuntu to give them experience in one of the larger > families of distribution derivative trees that I know of (which doesn't > mean much!), and OpenSuSE because that's what the course designer chose > (and I believe it was to give the students a wider range of > distributions than just RedHat and Debian-flavored distros). > > CentOS 7 went totally unusable last year when RedHat, in their infinite > wisdom, turned off their RPM servers, so I switched to CentOS Stream 9 > (I think its 9). Fortunately not much changed from the course's point > of view. ... snip ... As I recall, CentOS started as a community supported server OS (RHEL clone) and transitioned to an upstream distro for RHEL, after Redhat acquired the distro. Alma / Rocky Linux are the present day distros that CentOS used to be till CentOS 7 -- feature for feature and bug for bug clone of RHEL, built from RHEL src RPMS without the branding. > > (Anyone have recommendations on what would make up a good, well-rounded > balance of distros for the students? Please email me off-list about > this. If we get enough people interested in an entire discussion > 'group' on that, maybe we'll bring it back here, or I'll try to > summarize if there's interest.) I also taught Linux admin from the mid 90s to mid 2000s. Here's a list of my recommendations for production environments, to teach the students of what they may encounter at jobs. Alma / Rocky Linux (for RHEL experience) Ubuntu (covers Debian) Amazon Linux (RHEL clone with AWS's enhancements for deployment in their cloud. IIRC, they do point releases with kernel upgrades v/s backporting the RHEL way) Alpine (niche server deployments) It may be worthwhile for your students to document the equivalent tools on each of these distros. IMO, a good way to learn the similarities and differences. HTH -- Arun Khan --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss