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Comment by mfru | Hacker News Reader

can someone explain to me, now that CentOS is upstream of RHEL, what the difference between Fedora and Cent OS Stream is?

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Commits into CentOS Stream go through testing and become RHEL.

Those commits are mostly from Red Hat developers, because all RHEL devel now happens in Stream first, but iiuc technically anyone could submit a PR, and maybe CentOS Stream community members do that from time to time.

Fedora is entirely separate packages from CentOS/EL. Fedora is much closer to upstream projects. Fedora has shorter lifecycle, no API/ABI guarantee across releases, moves fasts and breaks more things, etc.

CentOS Stream also provides a way for the communities of various clones to contribute back. Previously if you found a bug all you could do was report it against RHEL (not even CentOS) and wait for a RH engineer to get to it, then wait again for it to be released, before you'd have a chance of even testing the fix on your own systems.

Fedora has a lot more churn and is more bleeding edge. Cent OS Stream is quite stable and is kind of like a thoroughly tested pre-release of the next version of RedHat.

Every fourth version of Fedora gets forked into the new version of CentOS Stream. Then for these rest of its lifecycle it will be developed independently. Every change in this version will go into the corresponding RHEL version after existing for afew months.

The numbered version of CentOS Stream is only "upstream" of the same numbered Enterprise Linux version. RHEL and CentOS 9 are both forked from Fedora 34, for example.

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