CentOS Linux 8 reached EOL on December 31, 2021

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toracat
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CentOS Linux 8 reached EOL on December 31, 2021

Post by toracat » 2022/01/03 17:42:10

CentOS Linux 8 reached end-of-life on December 31, 2021.

You should absolutely migrate to something else.

Some candidates for CentOS Linux 8 alternatives include:

* RHEL (no-cost subscriptions)
* Alma Linux
* Rocky Linux
* Springdale Linux (formerly PUIAS)
* Oracle Linux (OEL)
* CentOS Stream

RHEL is RHEL though the free subscription expires once a year and cannot be renewed until it does expire and then you have to re-register your systems to pick up the new subscription. Apart from being a bit of extra work once a year, the rest of that should be transparent - i.e. it doesn't require you to reinstall anything or make any changes to the system other than running subscription-manager to re-register.

All of Rocky/Alma/Springdale are or should be binary compatible with RHEL of the same version but will lag behind RHEL by a day or 6 as they can only rebuild things once the source has been pushed to git.centos.org. None of these need subscriptions. Rocky and Alma are both new players so do not have a long track record to judge them on.

OEL should be the same as RHEL except that it ships with their own "UEK" kernel though I believe the rebuild of the RHEL kernel is also available as an option. Again, rebuilds for their packages need to wait for the source to hit git.c.o.

CentOS Stream is the same as current RHEL except that it has updates in it that will not appear in RHEL until the next future point release (and sometimes not even then). It has updates in advance of RHEL but some of those sometimes may be withdrawn or subject to subsequent updates. Many of us do not consider Stream to be suitable for production workloads.
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