CentOS is dead — what now?

Hey folks!! In the past few days we were surprised by the news that Red Hat will no longer support CentOS — but what does that mean?

It means that CentOS Linux 8, which is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL), will reach end of support in 2021.

Once CentOS 8 support ends, you’ll need to migrate to CentOS Stream, which will receive updates the way CentOS used to and will serve as the upstream (development) branch for RHEL.

Meanwhile, the CentOS team will continue to support CentOS 7 until the end of the RHEL 7 lifecycle.

With the announcement of this transition, obviously some members of the CentOS community aren’t very happy about Red Hat’s change.

Instead of migrating to CentOS Stream, they could be looking at other enterprise Linux distributions such as SUSE and Ubuntu.

Surprisingly, the founder of the CentOS project, Greg Kurtzer, is not in favor of this decision. Consequently, one day after the announcement, he started and led — together with other members — a new alternative called Rocky Linux.

As the project’s site says, Rocky Linux is a community-driven enterprise OS designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

What do you think — is Red Hat right to end the project?