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Red Hat Kills CentOS Linux, Support for CentOS 8 Ends in 2021

         

robzilla

9:24 am on Dec 17, 2020 (gmt 0)

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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 is dead—and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement” [arstechnica.com]

The current version of CentOS is CentOS 8, itself built atop RHEL 8. Normally, CentOS enjoys the same ten-year support lifecycle as RHEL itself—which would give CentOS 8 an end-of-life date in 2029. This week's announcement puts a headstone on CentOS 8's grave much sooner, in 2021. (CentOS 7 will still be supported alongside RHEL 7, through 2024.)

Current CentOS users will need to migrate either to RHEL itself or to the newer CentOS Stream project, originally announced in September 2019. The distribution FAQ states that CentOS Stream will not be "the RHEL beta test platform," but CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen's own announcement describes Stream as "the upstream (development) branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

The line between "development branch" and "beta version" strikes us as vanishingly thin, and it seems to strike many CentOS community members the same way. The comments on the community announcement are legion and are overwhelmingly negative.

Well, ain't that something. I've just launched a couple of new servers running CentOS 8 this year, will have to start over now. Or switch to Stream, which isn't difficult but I'm not sure I want to be on what is essentially a beta platform for future RHEL releases.

Lots of fork projects are popping up, like Project Lenix [projectlenix.org] from CloudLinux and Rocky Linux [rockylinux.org] from one of the CentOS co-founders. It'll be interesting to see what remains when the dust settles, and who comes out on top. But mostly, this just sucks.

lammert

9:35 am on Dec 17, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It was already discussed in this thread [webmasterworld.com...] What RedHat seems to try is to put the community in front of the development cycle to pre-test solutions in Stream before they are implemented in RHEL, rather than having the community in the backseat profiting from the paid development of RHEL. I doubt the strategy will work out the way they intended.

graeme_p

1:36 pm on Dec 17, 2020 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



@lammert, I agree. They might make a short term gain from people switching from CentOS 8, but in the long run they will lose: people who start with CentOS and move to RHEL, people who use CentOS on some servers but pay for RHEL licences for critical ones, people who use CentOS for development and RHEL for production etc.

I also think that by not sticking to the original EOL, they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. If they had done this before Centos 8 had been released or announced that there was going to be no Centos 9 that would have been fine. As it is what they have done to people like robzilla is trick them into using Centos 8 by promising updates until 2028 and then told them updates will stop in 2021.

CloudLinux say they never relied on Centos, but I am not entirely convinced judging by the time and money they are putting into Lenix.

Interesting that this happened so soon after IBM bought Red Hat.

I suspect they have been opening the champagne at Canonical and SuSE. Those who want commercial support from the distro itself will go there. Personally I think it is an argument in favour of using Debian - if you need commercial support there are plenty of third parties who offer it.
 

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