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
<
plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> 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
(text/plain)