Red Hat has shaken the CentOS community. It was announced announcing that CentOS 8 does not supported until 2029, but only until the end of 2021. Instead, it now CentOS Stream, which delivers software packages that are newer and less tested are. CentOS is no longer equivalent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The date of this Announcement is unlikely: Only in November this year is the support for CentOS 6 and many companies have carried out a migration from CentOS 6 to CentOS 8.

For a productive environment, it is important not to unexpectedly update system components To get side effects. As an administrator, you can rely on security updates to be able to play in automatically while still sleeping quietly. In release management, you can usually enters the functional level of all packages and only publishes bug fixes and Security patches. Releases that are supported for a particularly long time are called "Long-Term Support" versions (LTS).

The CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer pointed out this announcement " Rocky Linux " created. It follows the original objective from CentOS to provide a free version of RHEL. Since the project has just started, will probably pass a few weeks or months until a stable version is released. To hope is that you can migrate existing CentOS 8 systems to Rocky Linux. The project gets in the community at any rate has a lot of attention and puts an impressive speed in Building the necessary infrastructure. The name goes to the now deceased CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh back.

A Change to CentOS Stream very beautiful easy. However, the question arises as to what extent stability under the new release model suffers:

"CentOS Stream now sits between the Fedora Project’s operating system innovation and RHEL’s production stability. [ Source: Red Hat Blog ]

The impression is that Red Hat wants direct competition to its own commercial Distribution weaken.

The easiest and safest way is to change to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Of course it costs Fees and you have to deal with license themes first. For example, there are different Licenses for physical systems, virtual machines and developer computers. There are exceptions for Server of Open Source projects. Some information can be found in Red Hat Store .
Other RHEL-based options are Amazon Linux optimized for AWS systems and Oracle Linux. Due to binding to these companies, special orientation and the smaller community we would not recommend these distributions at the current time.

Suse Linux Enterprise Server is like RHEL a commercial distribution. The LTS version even offers Updates for 13 years. The Lifecycle is not exactly defined for the free version OpenSuse. Each Main version supported at least 3 years .

Debian is one of the oldest Linux distributions. The first release dates from September 1993. Ubuntu has emerged as a fork from Debian in 2004.
Ubuntu and Debian also offer LTS versions. The current Ubuntu LTS version is 20.04 (April 2020. Ubuntu LTS Releases Become Five Years Supported for 20.04 until the end of April 2025 . The current Debian version (Buster) was released in June 2019 and will be released until June 2024 Support .
The LTS support of 5 years is clearly shorter compared to the 10 years of CentOS. On the other hand, maybe it's not bad to update his packages every 5 years to get from to benefit from new concepts and functions.

FreeBSD is not a Linux distribution but an event unixoidal operating system . It contains a completely different kernel, but is used for similar tasks. Every main version of FreeBSD becomes explicitly supported 5 years . Updates to a new main version are quite easy and bring often only conservative changes to the main system.

Most of our host systems are currently running on CentOS 7, which is supported by 2024. It delivers a stable base for the execution of docker containers. As well as all applications run in Docker containers. The containers are usually based on Debian Stable. The update cycle is more regular here and there is a wide selection of packages. Our storage servers run on FreeBSD. We are also very satisfied with this choice. There are also some desktop systems on Based on Ubuntu, Canonical offers very good hardware support.

We had planned an update of the host systems to CentOS 8. It's gonna be nothing more. We will first push the update a bit and the development of Rocky Linux watch. Fortunately, there are still plenty of attractive alternatives in doubt.

Since our systems are still on CentOS 7, we get updates until 2024 - there is a rush not so much.

Customers and other companies that already have CentOS 8 in use, we also recommend to wait a few months. At the latest in the middle of next year a decision should be taken here to have enough time to plan for migration.

If you need an individual recommendation on your system landscape, come to us .