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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.
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.
Traditional CentOS is a free-as-in-beer rebuilding of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, built from RHEL's own source code—but with Red Hat's proprietary branding removed and without Red Hat commercial support. This allowed CentOS to enjoy guaranteed binary compatibility with "proper" RHEL.
As a non-paywalled, no-hassles version of RHEL, CentOS appealed to a broader market of developers, tinkerers, and others who might eventually decide to upgrade to commercially supported RHEL. It also made it easier for developers to build and manage dev environments that would be guaranteed-compatible to their commercially supported RHEL production environments.
arstechnica.com
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.
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.
Traditional CentOS is a free-as-in-beer rebuilding of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system, built from RHEL's own source code—but with Red Hat's proprietary branding removed and without Red Hat commercial support. This allowed CentOS to enjoy guaranteed binary compatibility with "proper" RHEL.
As a non-paywalled, no-hassles version of RHEL, CentOS appealed to a broader market of developers, tinkerers, and others who might eventually decide to upgrade to commercially supported RHEL. It also made it easier for developers to build and manage dev environments that would be guaranteed-compatible to their commercially supported RHEL production environments.
CentOS Linux is dead—and Red Hat says Stream is “not a replacement”
CentOS Stream, founded in 2019, is “a rolling preview of what's next in RHEL.”
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