A year ago now, Red Hat announced the death of your CentOS Linux community distribution and your plans for launch a substitute with a similar name, but very different approach: CentOS Stream. Where the first was a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) aimed at the server realm and very focused on stability and long-term support, CentOS Stream would become the development version and ‘rolling release’ of RHEL, with constantly updated packages.
A big (and inexplicable) change for a distribution that, until then, was running the servers of Facebook, GoDaddy, Disney or the communications infrastructure of China. Tasks all of them for which the ‘new CentOS’ did not seem the best alternative (In fact, Red Hat has already stated that Stream is not a replacement for CentOS8.)
Red Hat also made the decision to End CentOS 8 support several years earlier than initially announced; in fact, it will end on December 31, even before CentOS 7 (although its repositories will still remain online for another year). CloudLinux, however, announced three months ago that it will offer four years of support to CentOS 8 users abandoned by Red Hat.
LINUX and GNU: LINUX: WHAT IT IS and HOW IT WORKS
CentOS Stream is now available
But by the time CentOS 8 support ends, CentOS Stream 9 will take three weeks on the market, as it was finally released on December 3. Now, will serve as a reference for the preparation of future stable versions of RHEL, allowing to refine them once the package update is ‘frozen’.
The new layout is based on Linux kernel 5.14. and the GNOME desktop environment, 40 and will feature the PipeWire media server (replacing PulseAudio and JACK) and relevant updates to key packages such as CCG, Nginx, PHP or Python.
If you are interested in trying CentOS Stream 9You can now download the ISO from the download section of its official website. Red Hat offers versions of this distribution for x86 64-bit, ARM 64-bit, and IBM Power architectures. Additionally, support for the IBM Z architecture (s390x Z14 +) has also been announced, but builds for it are not yet available.
Alternatives to CentOS
But if, as we said above, CentOS Stream has not come to replace CentOS, what alternatives do team administrators have that until now have been using CentOS? Fortunately, in the months since the announcement, various projects have come to light aimed at retaking what was CentOS…
…that is to say, a binary level clone of RHEL, intended to offer a stable solution for servers. Thus, the main ‘children’ or ‘alternatives’ of CentOS are the following:
- AlmaLinux: Launched by those responsible for CloudLinux (although now managed by its own foundation), AlmaLinux 8.5 is their proposal to have an exact copy of RHEL 8.5 (as you can see, their numbering goes hand in hand), and from the beginning it was seen by many as “the highest ranked successor to Centos”.
CloudLinux OS: Because of your optimizations, web hosting providers might be more interested in betting on CloudLinux that by his ‘brother’ AlmaLinux; its developers offer a script to convert current CentOS servers into existing CloudLinux machines without reconfiguration or data movement. Of course, it requires acquiring a paid license.
Rocky Linux: This CentOS fork was developed by none other than Greg Kurtzer, one of the original creators of it (and named after the other, Rocky McGough, now deceased), was downloaded 10,000 times during the first 12 hours it was online. Managed by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation.
Oracle Linux: Like CloudLinux, this Linux from Oracle (a company not always kind to free software) was around long before Red Hat sentenced CentOS to death. And like CloudLinux, it has released scripts to facilitate migration from CentOS 8 (and 7, and 6). It is not, however, a binary exact RHEL clone: has slight divergences in basic components such as Glibc and OpenSSL.
Navy Linux: Perhaps the least known option on the list, this clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux differs from its rivals by being focused on teams with minimal hardware requirements. It does not offer the installation of a graphical environment, only what is essential to function as a server. It is a project founded by Domingo Ruiz, a young Spanish computer scientist.
- RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure: The bone that Red Hat itself threw to the community as a way to compensate for the death of CentOS. This is another RHEL clone, available as free? for any non-profit project or foundation that is “involved with the development of open source software”.