CentOS 8 alternatives

In December 2020, Red Hat announced a change in CentOS 8 product policy. In short, the Red Hat-sponsored CentOS 8 community will focus on CentOS Stream and phase out CentOS 8 Linux at the end of 2021. This started a broad discussion in the open source operating system community. Which CentOS 8 alternatives will you use?

There are two sides to this story

On one side, there’s the argument that open source software as ‘libre software’ still costs money to build, maintain, and distribute.
This means that it’s in Red Hat’s interest for users to instead move to RHEL8 to get a stable system with support and security errata.
In addition to RHEL8, CentOS Stream “a clearer vision of what the next version of RHEL will be“.

On the other hand, users are dissatisfied because CentOS Stream is no longer a stable EL distribution that focuses on releases with a long maintenance period, stability and support,
and users also criticized the harsh and surprising move that CentOS will be a beta version of RHEL in the future.

centos 8 alternatives

In the future, users expect to test (read: find bugs) new features of the upcoming RHEL when using CentOS Stream. On the other hand, bug fixes will first appear in RHEL due to the nature of CVEs.

Please note that the “switch” from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream is only for version 8. You can still use CentOS 7 until its end of life in June 2024. Further information can be found on the CentOS product page.

What is your next move and which CentOS 8 alternative will you choose?

Will you move towards SUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an EL alternative? Or will you jump into the Debian Ecosystem with Debian or Ubuntu?

Whatever your next step will be, orcharhino is the solution for you. With orcharhino you can deploy and manage SLES (SCC Manager for convenient content import), Oracle Linux 8 and – of course – Debian and Ubuntu.

Are you already using CentOS Stream or a CentOS 8 alternative such as Alma Linux or Rocky Linux? Are you still running CentOS 7 in production but want to know what EL8 is all about before possibly migrating to EL8? If so, join us on December 12 at 4pm for our free webinar, “CentOS 8 Replacement: Which distribution will be the successor?” attend.