A friend of mine has been told me that 2020 is the year you expect one catastophe each month: we had Australian wildfires, pandemic (which still is going on), murder hornets, and so on. And now it is December!
Excluding those who might have been inside a cave, or have been otherwise distracted with real life events, it is fair to assume you know that CentOS as it is was (i.e. from before its 2014 aquisition by RedHat until now) will cease to exist in 2021, it will be replaced with CentOS Stream. I will not comment on the reason and whether that was to be expected after the IBM aquisition of RedHat; there is already a lot of people doing that, the comment session of that centos.org blog entry included. Instead, let's talk about the few things I know. From what I have gathered, its relationship with RHES has changed a bit. Before, changes were made to RHES and then applied to CentOS, but things have changed. For instance
- Normal patches: CentOS Stream first, then RHES
- Security Patches: RHES first, then CentOS Stream
- In the words of Chris Wright, Red Hat's CTO: "CentOS Stream isn’t a replacement for CentOS Linux". In fact, "CentOS Stream is an upstream development platform for ecosystem developers. It is a single, continuous stream of content with updates several times daily [...]". This is not a production operating system.
- EOL Date for Centos8 has changed from 2029 to 2021: Some may argue that is not the case, but allow me to refer to github change taken off the centos project repo.
- Non-RedHat repos, such as epel, will need to be more aggressive to catch up.
What to do?
I think that depends on how you feel about this and how much you have tied into CentOS.
- Stick with CentOS Stream. This may or not work; it probably would be wise to wait until, say, the middle of 2021 to see how this works out.
- Upgrade to a RHES subscription. In their defense, my experience with their paid technical support was very good. I do not know if my experience was unique.
- If you have a single private computer running CentOS, you can get a dev license for RHES.
- Switch to another RHES port. There are a few options here, which in a certain way behave like CentOS of old.
- Cloud Linux.
- Rocky Linux, which is founded by the CentOS creator.
- Oracle Linux. I would suggest to check Oracle's history in the open source community.
- Switch to another distro. If you do not want to have any further business with a Red Hat distro, there are options for server (Arch linux: please step away from the line even though you have excellents docs.) duties:
- Linux
- Debian, a very stable operating system. Its project leader, Jonathan Carter, wrote a blog about the CentOS demise.
- Ubuntu, which it seems to be the platform of choice of many new developments. Just check where code for GPUs and FPGAs is first written on.
- Open SuSe. It may not be as popular as Debian and RedHat based distros but it is a good contender.
- NOT Linux
- FreeBSD. Very stable UNIX operating system. Package list is smaller than Linux though, but this is a proper server operating system. If you like ZFS, you may want to investigate it, or at least FreeNAS (Now called TrueNAS).
- OpenBSD. From the same people who brought us openssl and openssh. When was the last time you heard of people breaking into an OpenBSD box?
- Linux
And that is all for now. If you expected a nice closing argument, there is none. This is just a change. Think of CentOS as a cheese: it moved; now you have to choose if you are going to follow it or look for another cheese.
