CentOS 8 alternatives

In December 2020 Red Hat announced a shift in the product politics of CentOS 8. In a nutshell, the Red Hat sponsored CentOS 8 community will focus on CentOS Stream and discontinue CentOS 8 Linux at the end of 2021. This started a broad discussion in the open source operating system community. Which CentOS 8 alternative will you choose?

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.
Next to RHEL8, CentOS Stream will provide ‘a clearer vision of what the next version of RHEL will be’.

On the other side, users are unhappy due to CentOS Stream not being a stable EL distribution with focus on long term releases, stability, and support any longer.
Users also criticised the harsh and surprising move towards CentOS being a beta version of RHEL in the future.

CentOS 8 alternatives

In the future, users expect the test features (read: experience bugs) for 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 only happens for version 8. You can still use CentOS 7 until it’s end of life in June 2024. Please visit the CentOS product page CentOS product page for more information.

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 move is, orcharhino has got you covered. With orcharhino you can provision and manage SLES (use 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 happily running CentOS 7 in production but want to know what’s going on with EL8 before potentially migrating to EL8? If so, join our webinar ‘CentOS 8 Replacement: Which distribution will be the successor?‘ on Dec. 12, 2021 at 4pm CET.