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Comment by tadbit | Hacker News Reader

CentOS 8 was supposed to be supported into 2029. Approximately a year or so after being released that was changed and would only be supported into 2021.

Many people in the CentOS community, even RHEL employees, tried to play it off like they never meant to support it so long, but some time after the announcement they confirmed they did indeed strip away 8 years of the planned support.

This burned a lot of people that had already started deploying systems using CentOS 8 into Production. A lot of time and money has been spent by many people, organizations, and companies rectifying this situation.

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Additionally, CentOS has become "CentOS Stream" and no longer is 1:1 with RHEL and considered stable. It's an in-between Fedora (bleeding edge) and RHEL (boring and stable), which means things might change or break, etc... which is sort of the opposite of what your typical CentOS user wanted. Really a missed mark from IBM/RH.

This led to several CentOS replacement distros, including Rocky Linux (made by many original CentOS people), AlmaLinux and others. Both Rocky and Alma are supporting 8.x for 10 years, prompting many CentOS users to switch over.

As I understand it, this is an incorrect representation of what Stream is. Unfortunately I rarely see this misconception corrected.

Stream is only "between" fedora and RedHat until RHEL X.0 is released.

For instance, once RHEL 9.0 development branched from fedora 34, Stream 9 became the upstream and just ahead of all further RHEL 9.X releases, and doesn't depend on fedora anymore.

Furthermore all Stream rpms undergo the exact same RHEL testing and quality validation chain than proper RHEL packages.

As such by using Stream 9, you are arguably receiving the bug fixes that are eventually going into RHEL 9 proper, just in advance a bit.

RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.

> RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.

Wow, what a remarkable offering; they give free users even better service than their paying customers! It's so benevolent of them to give such amazing service away and definitely not use this totally-better product as a beta to ship updates before it gets to the stable users.

Edit: Seriously, though; if a company has 2 almost-identical products and claims that the free product is equal or better than the free product, they're either lying to the free users or defrauding the paying users.

The people who pay for RHEL want the stability. So a faster-updating OS is technically superior but requires more regular testing & development work from the customer side.

The people using CentOS also wanted the stability. And if RH had added Stream as an option, that would have been totally reasonable and a great move. It was the way they killed the stable version while proclaiming that Stream was totally a good replacement that was disingenuous, because it was not a replacement for "as stable as RHEL without cost".

I've never seen anyone use this logic to recommend installing Windows Insider on production servers.

Yeah, Red Hat is actually moving the black box of releasing-engineering out in the wide open, for anybody to replicate, and see how the sausage is made.

CentOS Stream would be a perfectly suitable alternative to RHEL9, and in many ways more desirable. And, in a strange way all those people who were being super conservative... more attracted to centos being behind RHEL, as if that made CentOS more stable by being slightly behind... well, that's RHEL now. So.. uh.. maybe just use RHEL instead, since it's now even more conservative? Also, it's important to recognize during all the drama, Red Hat changed their licensing to be pretty much free for small to medium sized operations. So the argument of being cheap, or whatever free value of CentOS is now entirely gone... Red Hat only cares to license from the medium to large.

One thing that hasn't been clear to me about CentOS Stream is if it is possible to determine that the repos at this instant are identical to a given RHEL minor release (and possibly stay there temporarily). For example, if I have a non-production system running CentOS Stream 8 so I can test out changes to RHEL earlier, can I be confident that testing on a certain date will be applicable to the next RHEL release when it comes out, or do I still need to test on RHEL separately when it is released?

I believe the answer is yes, but I'm not 100%.

My understanding is the the stream repo sorta rolls forward but leaves behind a trail of X.Y.Z checkpoint repos representing major.minor.batch-number, so that would be like rhel-9.1.0 for the zero-day batch of updates on rhel-9.1

This is not true at all.

CentOS Streams is the next X-Release of RHEL. I work with RH Partners and we use Streams as a test platform before we move to QE on Beta and RC builds.

This has been refuted by RH many times. You want to be upset they took away CentOS, that is your choice but spreading incorrect information about Streams is simply misleading.

> It's an in-between Fedora (bleeding edge) and RHEL (boring and stable), which means things might change or break, etc...

This is a misleading explanation.

CentOS Stream 9 stays between RHEL 9.X and RHEL 9.X+1.

Once branched from Fedora CentOS Stream follows RHEL ABI compatibility of that specific major version and doesn't consume Fedora updates.

It is also tested together with RHEL.

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