CentOS which stands for Community Enterprise Operating System is one of the popular Linux distribution among Linux community. Red Hat recently announced that they are moving from CentOS to CentOS stream and End of Life for CentOS Linux 8 by Dec’21. That means no CentOS 9 release, instead we will see a new release in CentOS stream. Coming soon – “CentOS stream 9”.
This decision of Red Hat may sound bit confusing for all, so to make it clear, let’s look at some basics. Let’s look at where CentOS was/is positioned by Red Hat.
CentOS Linux is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without support and released after RHEL launch. This is downstream from RHEL. Fedora on the other hand is a fast-paced operating system innovation project driven by community. Fedora releases new version every six months. Here is how the OS stream was before the announcement.
Fedora —> RHEL —> CentOS Linux
Now with CentOS stream and Red Hat’s announcement, the OS positioning looks like this:
Fedora —> CentOS stream —> RHEL
With Fedora, developers can build the operating system and integrate all the associated open source projects. This is added to CentOS stream and finally goes to RHEL. Now with CentOS stream, CentOS becomes an upstream project rather than downstream which was the case with CentOS Linux.
In CentOS stream, developers can see what’s coming in latest RHEL release, contribute to RHEL releases, make changes in hardware or software and be fully ready for RHEL latest version. Developers can contribute new features and bug fixes even to minor RHEL release.
RHEL will follow a release cadence of one major release every 3 years and a minor release every 6 months.
To conclude, positioning CentOS as an upstream project makes more sense and is strategic. CentOS stream will make RHEL better than ever.
