I don't know much about CentOS, but I've seen a lot of anger about the end of CentOS Linux, regardless of CentOS stream, Rocky, etc. . Can someone explain the history of this, why CentOS is going away, why it's being replaced with these new alternatives, and why many seem quite mad about it? Just curious to understand the state of it.
>RedHat acquired CentOS, saying that it would be good for CentOS[1].
>RedHat shut CentOS down.
It should be noted that six years passed between point A and point B, during which time Red Hat did invest quite a lot of additional resources in CentOS. Red Hat did not acquire CentOS and then immediately shut it down.
CentOS Stream is also not a wholly different thing from CentOS, although it is obviously not exactly the same thing.
Red Hat had given a lifecycle for CentOS 8 with an EOL in 2029. IBM acquired Red Hat, and promptly announced they were reneging on this schedule. Given that the primary draw of CentOS/RHEL are long-term, reliable, well-supported, stable operating systems, users were... displeased.
CentOS stream is primarily intended to onboard users onto RHEL, which is undesirable when nobody trusts Red Hat to keep their word now.
Thanks! Can we see who updated the wiki? If it’s some random person, then I’m not sure it’s quite the smoking gun I’m looking for. If they are someone more closely associated with the project you’d expect to made decisions about this stuff, then that is very useful to know. Thank you!
I suppose people are trying to claim this wasn't actual CentOS policy, but it was, and when the project abruptly decided to truncate eight years of announced support, at no point did anyone involved deny this was a change.
One of the biggest issue is that they pulled the rug on the support window. The last release started out with 10 years of support, but they walked back on that when they announced the end of regular CentOS and reduced it by more than half.
> The last release started out with 10 years of support, but they walked back on that when they announced the end of regular CentOS and reduced it by more than half.
I thought that the "10 years of support" which was customary w/ CentOS wasn't applied, but neither Red Hat nor CentOS made specific announcements that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support. People believed that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support because of what was done in the past, but that's always subject to change.
If, however, there were direct statements from Red Hat or CentOS that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support and then they changed that - that's moving the cheese for sure.
I think you are right. I haven't been able to find any direct EOL date from RH even at launch. It seems like it was mostly people just assuming (for good reasons, but still just assuming) that it had the same EOL.
Though there are some gaps on the Wayback machine that makes it hard to find some centos8 related posts at the time it launched, but I'd be surprised if the eol wouldn't have been announced elsewhere too.
It was customary to be 10 years, but I don’t even know if anyone announced that. I guess I’d compare it to cancelling a pretty good sitcom in the level of consternation. Frustrated that I have to find something else to do on Tuesday night, but I really should read a book instead (use less proprietary Linux).
