Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

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asmodeus410
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Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by asmodeus410 » 2022/04/17 14:15:58

Hi !
Im not sure how centos stream works in terms of releases and end of life
I think that centos stream is a rolling release right ?, so to go from centos 8 stream to centos 9 stream you dont need to reinstall ? just dnf upgrade ?
Today I saw on the internet that centos 8 stream end of life will be 2024. How come ?
Then, I was wrong ? installing a centos stream does not prevent an end of life ¿

Kind Regards

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TrevorH
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by TrevorH » 2022/04/17 15:31:21

to go from centos 8 stream to centos 9 stream you dont need to reinstall ? just dnf upgrade ?
No, it's a reinstall from scratch.
Today I saw on the internet that centos 8 stream end of life will be 2024. How come ?
Because that's what Red Hat decided it would be. As soon as RHEL 8 goes into the last phase of maintenance, support for Stream 8 is dropped.

If you want the full 10 year RHEL lifetime then you need to use either RHEL itself or one of the "clones".
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

asmodeus410
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by asmodeus410 » 2022/04/17 16:02:33

Hi TrevorH,
thanks for your reply.
You mean other clones like ? anything free ? Im not a company making money out of it, just a individual researcher that wants to use a free OS
I guess that rocky should have also a short end of life, right ?
KR

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jlehtone
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by jlehtone » 2022/04/17 16:21:56

CentOS Stream is essentially a preview of what the next point update of RHEL will contain. Once RHEL has released its last point update there will be nothing more to preview for that major version of RHEL. The RHEL 8 has last planned point update in 2024, and thus that is where CentOS Stream 8 will end.

Red Hat releases the open source sources of RHEL to public. "Clones", like AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, EuroLinux, Navy Linux, etc (and CentOS Linux and Scientific Linux used to) rebuild themselves from the publicly available sources of RHEL. AFAIK, they are all free of charge. RHEL does have a free of charge subscription too.

While last point update of RHEL 8 will be in 2024, the RHEL maintenance phase that continues to 2029 will release sources too. That is why the "clones" of RHEL 8 can exist to 2029.

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TrevorH
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by TrevorH » 2022/04/17 19:03:03

All of Rocky/Alma/OEL are free to use, rebuilds of RHEL and aim to provide copies of their distro until the intended EOL date of RHEL 8 in 2029.
The future appears to be RHEL or Debian. I think I'm going Debian.
Info for USB installs on http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/InstallFromUSBkey
CentOS 5 and 6 are deadest, do not use them.
Use the FAQ Luke

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systemfailure0x5a
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by systemfailure0x5a » 2022/04/24 17:21:18

asmodeus410 wrote:
2022/04/17 16:02:33
Hi TrevorH,
thanks for your reply.
You mean other clones like ? anything free ? Im not a company making money out of it, just a individual researcher that wants to use a free OS
I guess that rocky should have also a short end of life, right ?
KR
Fedora Linux is the bleeding edge version of RedHat software. It contains the newest features but the constant updates break a lot of tutorials, software configurations, etc. A lot of people like it because it always has the latest thingamabob. This is where much of the active development takes place.

CentOS Stream is more stable, and is essentially RedHat Enterprise Linux with more frequent updates. However, it's much more stable and documented than Fedora. It's basically just slightly ahead of RedHat Enterprise Linux.

Redhat Enterprise linux is the most stable. This is essentially the final release of all the upstream development.

You can actually go to http://www.redhat.com and sign up as a developer. They will give you several licenses. You can then download the official Redhat Enterprise Workstation ISOs and install it on your computer. I used to do this myself, until CentOS Stream was announced.

Now what I do is I run a few instances of Redhat Enterprise Server in the cloud for various websites and services I run myself. For my desktop, I'm running CentOS Stream 9, since it's very stable, runs almost exactly like RedHat, gets slightly more frequent updates, and gives me a taste of new features coming that I may eventually run on my servers.

I'd recommend CentOS Stream over Fedora if you want a solid, highly documented system. But you can also download the official Redhat and give it a try too.

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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by Blisk » 2022/05/22 08:07:42

Which one is better Alma or Rocky ot which one have more support?

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jlehtone
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Re: Doubt about Centos stream (rolling release) EOL End Of Life

Post by jlehtone » 2022/05/22 08:39:55

Yes.

This table tries to summarize the differences between the two: https://wiki.almalinux.org/Comparison.html

Both strive to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, so the difference is not in the software.

Has one gathered larger community than the other so far? Perhaps, but doesn't that tell mostly about quality of marketing?

AFAIK, both have a migration script that can convert most EL8 distros into that distro, so that no matter which you install now, it should be trivial to convert to the other, if there is a need.

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