CentOS Linux is dead—and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”

Enlarge / Looks like CentOS Linux will be sleeping with the fishes. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen each announced a massive change in the future and function of CentOS Linux. Moving forward, there will be no CentOS Linux-instead, there will (only) be CentOS Stream.

Originally announced in September 2019, CentOS Stream serves as "a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL"-it's intended to look and function much like a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it will be a year or so in the future.

What's a CentOS, anyway?

CentOS-which is short for Community Enterprise Linux Operating System-was founded in 2004. CentOS' first 2004 release was named version 2-to coincide with then-current RHEL 2.1. Since then, each major version increment of RHEL has resulted in a corresponding new major version of CentOS, following the same versioning scheme and built largely from the same source.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments