CentOS 8 Ending Next Year To Focus Shift On CentOS Stream

Well here is a surprise for those that have long used CentOS as the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux... CentOS 8 will end in 2021 and moving forward CentOS 7 will remain supported until the end of its lifecycle but CentOS Stream will be the focus as the future upstream of RHEL.

For those relying on CentOS 8 to enjoy the reliability and features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 but without the licensing costs, etc, that will end in 2021. At the end of 2021, CentOS 8 will no longer be maintained but CentOS 7 will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024.

CentOS Linux 8 will end in 2021 and shifts focus to CentOS Stream - nixCraft

CentOS is an acronym for Community Enterprise Operating System, and it is a 100% rebuild of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). While RHEL costs money, CentOS offered as a free community-supported enterprise Linux distro. Developers and companies who are good at Linux and don't want to pay RHEL support fees always selected CentOS to save money and get enterprise-class software. However, the free ride is over. Red Hat announced that CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

CentOS Project Shifts Focus to CentOS Stream

The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release. CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end at the end of 2021. CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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CentOS Stream will also be the centerpiece of a major shift in collaboration among the CentOS Special Interest Groups (SIGs). This ensures SIGs are developing and testing against what becomes the next version of RHEL. This also provides SIGs a clear single goal, rather than having to build and test for two releases. It gives the CentOS contributor community a great deal of influence in the future of RHEL. And it removes confusion around what “CentOS” means in the Linux distribution ecosystem.

When CentOS Linux 8 (the rebuild of RHEL8) ends, your best option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8, which is a small delta from CentOS Linux 8, and has regular updates like traditional CentOS Linux releases. If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options.

CentOS announces reduced lifecycle on CentOS 8 and Stream Focus

My following statements will pigeon-hole both Fedora and CentOS as being a-certain-thing when they are really nuanced and multi-faceted. Fedora is way ahead of RHEL... and RHEL was usually freezing on a version of Fedora and then building on it for a year to a year and a half before it became RHEL and by that time, Fedora had kept on moving with 3 more releases. So while Fedora is (again in a single aspect) the proving ground for new technologies... it led by alot.

CentOS dumping tells us Red Hat has only dollar signs in its sights

Open source company Red Hat's decision to gut its CentOS distribution should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the company for some years and seen how it has gone from having some ethics and principles to just another American software firm: one that places the profit motive above everything.

Red Hat kills off CentOS; users frustrated, angry and annoyed

Less than a year and a half after it was bought by IBM, the biggest open source company Red Hat has killed off CentOS, once an independent project but since January 2014 a part of Red Hat itself.

IBM’s Red Hat Just Killed CentOS as we Know it: With CentOS Stream, Stability Goes out of the Door

CentOS is regarded as a stable, secure and free Linux distribution for servers. The stability part of it is being jeopardized thanks to the latest changes made to this project by IBM-owned Red Hat. Here’s a quick summary...

Red Hat resets CentOS Linux and users are angry

Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release." In other words, CentOS will no longer be a stable point distribution but a rolling release Linux distribution. CentOS users are ticked off.

Why? First, you need to understand what's going on. A rolling-release Linux is one that's constantly being updated. Examples of these include Arch, Manjaro, and openSUSE Tumbleweed. Here, CentOS Stream will be RHEL's upstream (development) branch. This may sound like CentOS will be RHEL's beta, but CentOS denies this.

In the CentOS FAQ, the company states: "CentOS Stream will be getting fixes and features ahead of RHEL. Generally speaking, we expect CentOS Stream to have fewer bugs and more runtime features than RHEL until those packages make it into the RHEL release."

Why the shift from CentOS to CentOS Stream is a big mistake

If you follow open source enough, you might have heard the latest grumblings from the belly of the sleeping beast--Red Hat has announced it was killing CentOS as we currently know it and is replacing that beloved, highly stable server distribution with CentOS Stream. What is CentOS Stream? Put simply, it's a rolling release version of CentOS. If you're following along, you understand why this is a big mistake. If you're not quite sure of that path from A to Z, let me explain.

First, a bit of education.

The CentOS Project Just Committed Suicide

In shocking news the CentOS project announced today that are shifting their Linux distribution to be based on the beta (non-stable) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, rather than the stable branch. And that they are terminating CentOS 8 updates at the 31st of December, 2021.

The CentOS project will now release something named “CentOS Stream”, which is a Linux distribution built on the beta branch of RHEL so that contributors and interested groups can solve issues and report bugs before the software are shipped in RHEL. In other words, CentOS will become a testing mice for RHEL before new RHEL versions get released.

Historically, the CentOS Linux distribution was always built on the stable branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, providing binary compatibility between the two while also providing the same quality and stability. Red Hat publishes the source RPMs (SPRMS) of all its packages publicly on the Internet, and what the CentOS project was doing is that it was taking these packages, building them, and then shipping them under the CentOS re-branding. It also provided a promise that it will support each CentOS release up to 10 years with updates. Today, all of these promises are canceled as the project takes a new direction.

CentOS Changes to CentOS Stream, Moving to UNSTABLE

CentOS has officially made the statement that they will be changing direction and be basing their project on RHEL's unstable branch for the foreseeable future and will ditch any "lifelong" support as previously "promised".

This is all literally a business move on the folks who own Red Hat now—who also own CentOS.

All I can say is GOOOODD LUCCCCKKKK.

CentOS's switch to Stream is a major change in what CentOS is

The switch to CentOS Stream makes two major changes to what CentOS is from CentOS 8 onward (CentOS 7 is currently unaffected). First, it shortens the package update period to no more than five years, because package updates for the CentOS Stream version of RHEL stop at the end of RHEL's five year full support period. In practice CentOS Stream for is not likely to be immediately available when RHEL is launched, and you won't install it immediately even if it was, so you will get less than five years of package updates before you must switch or operate machines without someone providing security updates for you.

CentOS Linux is dead—and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”

On Tuesday, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen each announced a massive change in the future and function of CentOS Linux. Moving forward, there will be no CentOS Linux—instead, there will (only) be CentOS Stream.

Originally announced in September 2019, CentOS Stream serves as "a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL"—it's intended to look and function much like a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it will be a year or so in the future.

CentOS Linux reborn as Rocky Linux enterprise operating system

As you know, Red Hat and IBM shocked the Linux community by killing CentOS 8 stable. There will be no CentOS Linux. Red Hat announced that there would be only CentOS Stream, which will act as a rolling version, and it will be used as next RHEL. Now we have a possible alternative called Rocky Linux.

I think Red Hat/IBM underestimated the Linux community. Did they believe they will get away with a significant change? How did they not see this coming? I think IBM and Red Hat no longer care about opensource. They went ahead and removed much stuff from the CentOS wiki too.

Jonathan Carter: CentOS Stream, or Debian?

Earlier this week, the CentOS project announced the shift to CentOS stream. In a nutshell, this means that they will discontinue being a close clone of RHEL along with security updates, and instead it will serve as a development branch of RHEL.

As you can probably imagine (or gleam from the comments in that post I referenced), a lot of people are unhappy about this.

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I’m also somewhat skeptical of how successful CentOS Stream will really be in any form of a community project. It seems that Red Hat is expecting that volunteers should contribute to their product development for free, and then when these contributors actually want to use that resulting product, they’re expected to pay a corporate subscription fee to do so. This seems like a very lop-sided relationship to me, and I’m not sure it will be sustainable in the long term. In Red Hat’s announcement of CentOS Stream, they kind of throw the community a bone by saying “In the first half of 2021, we plan to introduce low- or no-cost programs for a variety of use cases”- it seems likely that this will just be for experimental purposes similar to the Windows Insider program and won’t be of much use for production users at all.

Red Hat does point out that their Universal Base Image (UBI) is free to use and that users could just use that on any system in a container, but this doesn’t add much comfort to the individuals and organisations who have contributed huge amounts of time and effort to CentOS over the years who rely on a stable, general-purpose Linux system that can be installed on bare metal.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

The CentOS project, a non-commercial Linux distribution that tracks Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), is changing to become only CentOS Stream, based on a development branch of RHEL and therefore less suitable for production workloads.

The implication may be that Red Hat has decided that the availability of CentOS undermines the commercial side of its business. "If you are using CentOS Linux 8 in a production environment, and are concerned that CentOS Stream will not meet your needs, we encourage you to contact Red Hat about options," said CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen.

Lilbits: The death of CentOS Linux, the rise of RISC-V, and last call for the F(x)Tec Pro1 X

The Future of CentOS Is CentOS Stream

Red Hat’s senior vice president and chief technology officer Chris Wright says, “CentOS Stream isn’t a replacement for CentOS Linux; rather, it’s a natural, inevitable next step intended to fulfill the project’s goal of furthering enterprise Linux innovation. Stream shortens the feedback loop between developers on all sides of the RHEL landscape, making it easier for all voices, be they large partners or individual contributors, to be heard as we craft future versions of RHEL.”

Nobody Owns Linux, But You Can Pay For It – Or Not

There is nothing quite like the open source community to demonstrate the principles of freedom, democracy, and meritocracy – and the difficulties of bringing those principles to bear and keeping them pure when money is involved.

Open source software is not just about having access to source code, but that is a kind of protection against tyranny if parts of the community, particularly corporate sponsors who cut the paychecks for a lot of the developers – either directly or indirectly – who create open source software, particularly the Linux kernel and the operating system that is stacked up around it in various distributions.

Quite a big stink is being made their week as Red Hat has made some major changes to the CentOS variant of its Enterprise Linux. And that is mostly because since its creation CentOS has been what amounts to a community supported variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that sits downstream from the RHEL development – meaning, it is rolled up from the source code after Red Hat is done – and Red Hat has reversed the polarity of the CentOS project it took over in 2014 and plans to move it upstream, as CentOS Stream, thus turning it into yet another development release like the Fedora project has been for many years and which also feeds into RHEL in some fashion. (Don’t even start thinking about how CoreOS Linux, which Red Hat acquired in January 2018 and which underpins its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform, fits into all of this.)

As the world’s largest company devoted to the development of commercial grade open source infrastructure software and arguably the only company that will ever be able to make this model work from a commercial standpoint at this scale, Red Hat can afford to have many different kinds of Linux that its employees contribute code to. The company rakes in somewhere north of $3 billion a year selling support contracts for such software, and has a vested interest in making sure the Linux operating system keeps getting more and better features added to it as well as support for successive generations of hardware. And to be fair, Red Hat does its share of this work and has since the company was founded decades ago. It is in this sense, though, that companies really are paying for Linux.

CentOS Stream was announced somewhat innocuously in September 2019, two months after IBM closed its landmark $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. That timing might be coincidence, but maybe not. IBM has promised to keep a hand’s off approach to Red Hat, and is a just as likely that the Red Hat team is making this change all on its own as it is likely that Big Blue is coercing it.

CentOS Stream was designed to create a half-way point between the Fedora development release, which is changing like crazy all the time, and the commercial-grade Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, which changes on a regular, predictable, and relatively infrequent cadence of about twice a year. To be more precise, CentOS Stream is the code-base for the minor RHEL releases, and parts of RHEL development were actually moved into the CentOS project to get everyone collaborating. Which was good.

Migrating CentOS 6, 7, and 8 to Oracle Linux

With CentOS Linux 8 announced dead by the end of 2021 and CentOS Stream being an entirely different release and support model, one wonders if it’s possible to switch to Oracle Linux.

What’s Oracle Linux? Like CentOS, it’s a Red Hat Enterprise Linux rebuild, with some Oracle patches on top. One of the key differences is choosing either RHEL-compatible kernel or their own Unbreakable Linux kernel. To know more about Oracle Linux, read this PDF or head over to their homepage.

Oracle has 6.10, 7.9 and 8.3 versions ready to download. Since many infrastructure providers such as Digital Ocean do not have Oracle Linux on offer and given the OL similarity to CentOS, one can try to switch directly from the CentOS system.

Rocky Linux is go: CentOS founder's new project aims to be 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of the CentOS project, has kicked off a new venture called Rocky Linux, the aim being to build "a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100 per cent bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)".

Just days after Red Hat CTO Chris Wright declared that "we will shift our investments to CentOS Stream exclusively on December 31, 2021," the Rocky Linux project has been formed with a new distro "currently under major intensive development by the community," although there is "no ETA at present for a release."

CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream are free community distributions. The problem with CentOS Stream is that it is a development build, although one that is only just ahead of the production release of RHEL. This makes it unsuitable for production use.

CENTOS IS DEAD, LONG LIVE CENTOS

Red hat started way back in 1995, with the partnership between Bob Young and Marc Ewing. Ewing brought his nascent Linux distro, named Red Hat Linux after the fedora red lacrosse cap Ewing was known for wearing. Red Hat Linux quickly introduced a set of killer features, such as the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM), the Anaconda installer, and ELF binaries, to name a few. By 2003, Red Hat Linux was split into two separate distros, RHEL and Fedora Core. RHEL was the subscription-only distribution, while Fedora Core was the bleeding-edge distribution available for free. Just a note, I was running Fedora on my machines since before they dropped “Core” from the name.

The RHEL product, while open source, is only available for paid subscribers, or developers in non-production environments. Because it’s open source, there is nothing preventing a third party from removing the branding, and recompiling the packages for free. This is exactly what Gregory Kurtzer and the other founding members of CentOS did back in 2004. CentOS version 2 was the first such release, bringing an Enterprise Linux to the Community.

CentOS founder's new distro, Rocky Linux, to replace what Red Hat killed

The founder of the CentOS project, Gregory M. Kurtzer, has set up a new distribution called Rocky Linux, and aims to replicate what he did with CentOS – provide users with a distro that is similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, apart from the trademarks.

After CentOS, the next one to bite the dust will be Fedora

Gutting CentOS will mean that Red Hat will have to devote less developer time to it; what time is put in for the new so-called CentOS Stream will be essentially QA time for RHEL.

And what of Fedora? I don't want to sound like a prophet of doom but the days of the so-called community distribution are numbered. Why would Red Hat expend energy and developer time on Fedora when it can ask users of this distro to switch to the CentOS Stream instead?

All the Fedora user complaints, fixes and mailing list posts would serve as excellent free labour for the CentOS Stream. And that is essentially the point. In true gig economy fashion, Red Hat will be getting developer hours free.

GNU/Linux was once an operating system around which there was some idealism. Now, Red Hat has ensured that the only thing one sees when looking at a penguin is the greenback. Or the British pound. Or the Australian dollar. Or the Philippine peso. Or the UAE dirham. Or maybe the South African rand. And don't forget the euro.

Where do I go now that CentOS Linux is gone? Check our list

In an unexpected announcement earlier this week, Red Hat killed off the free-as-in-beer CentOS variant of their flagship distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The announcement—which clearly stated "CentOS Stream is not a replacement for CentOS Linux"—left thousands of CentOS users stunned and bewildered. In many cases, CentOS users had migrated to CentOS 8—which they expected to receive support until 2029—only to find out that their "until-2029" distro had become an "until-2021" distro just a few months after they'd installed it in the first place.

I can't pretend this is good news for CentOS users, but I can offer some good news: CentOS might be dead, but it's far from your only option for a "rebuild" distro that's binary-compatible with RHEL. Let's take a look at a few of the most likely options below.

CentOS killed by IBM – a chance to go new ways?

But this post is not about BSD, because there simply are cases where you want (or need) a Linux system. And when it comes to stability, CentOS was simply a very good choice that’s very hard to replace with something else. Fortunately Rocky Linux was announced (https://rockylinux.org) – an effort by the original founder of CentOS who wants to basically repeat what he once did. I wish the project good luck. However I’d also like to take the chance as an admin and hobby distro tinkerer to discuss what CentOS actually stood for and if we could even accomplish something better! Heresy? Not so much. There’s always room for improvement. Let’s at least talk about it.

On the whole CentOS thing

Well, I guess we know what's up with that now. The latest news this week is that CentOS 8 is having the rug pulled out from under it. Instead of having a final EOL of 2029, it now hits the wall in *six months* and will be completely dead in twelve. By the end of 2021, it will be all over.

What's coming is something using the same name to push a different kind of product - one I'm not looking to run. I want boring. I *like* boring. I want a machine that just sits there and occasionally drops in a new patch and never picks up any new features. This is a good thing to me.

Centos and the end of a horrible year (Part II

2020 will be for most people one of the worst years in their living memory. The world is under lockdown because of SARS-Corona Virus 2 or better Covid-19. As I’m a member of a risk group, my social life is already for almost 9 month limited to telephone and video calls.

And on top of all that, in the last month of 2020 two of my favorite software projects changed directions and removed the main reasons why I’m using them. This blog post is about Centos. The Graylog Blog post was Part I.