First, what is a Rolling Release, and why is everyone so mad about it?
Well Wikipedia defines a rolling release as follows:
Rolling release, rolling update, or continuous delivery, in software development, is the concept of frequently delivering updates to applications. This is in contrast to a standard or point release development model which uses software versions that must be reinstalled over the previous version. An example of this difference would be the multiple versions of Ubuntu Linux versus the single, constantly updated version of Arch Linux.
Well, now we know what it is… why is everyone so mad?
It is because a rolling release, even though it is constantly being fixed can be quite unstable. This is not a huge deal for applications running in a desktop environment, but in a real production environment it is not acceptable.
To give an example, if you were running an application in a production. A library underneath could get updated, and break your application without any notice. In fact, it is common practice for many enterprise applications to “holdback” a version of an application; or even host the install files in their own repository to ensure nothing malicious makes its way in.
So in short, and in my opinion, Red Hat bought CentOS a few years back as they were becoming the competition. As everyone feared then, they are essentially making it a non-enterprise product. This is likely due to the large chunk of the market they are loosing to Ubuntu. Which is well deserved in my opinion.
Hope this was informational… Have a good rest of your 2020!