Original: Taste of Little Sister (wechat official ID: XjjDog), welcome to share, please reserve the source.

On December 8, 2020, the CentOS development team announced in their official blog that CentOS 8 will end support by the end of 2021, which means that CentOS Linux 9 and CentOS 10 will not be available.

When I heard the news, my eggs broke all over the floor.

Now, as the ultimatum draws closer, we have to consider the next steps.

The good news, however, is that while CentOS8 will soon be dead, CentOS7 will be supported until June 30, 2024. So in the short term, it doesn’t really matter to CentOS7 users. It’s just bitter for CentOS8’s aggressive adopters.

We have three years to figure out what to do next.

CentOS is a free, stable distribution completely rebuilt from RHEL, which is most widely used in CentOS7. CentOS8 became the shortest-lived distribution of CentOS, a version that ended before it started.

In addition to business reasons, Red Hat is making this move because the current distribution doesn’t look much like an operating system. CentOS6, CentOS7, CentOS8, etc., with specific version numbers, can be upgraded from a lower version of Linux to a higher version of Linux only by reinstalling the system, which is costly. New CentOS Stream, can implement rolling upgrade function, only need to network update can ensure that the system is up to date.

So Red Hat is now working on CentOS Stream.

However, such an upgrade, for the pursuit of stability based server environment, is not necessarily a good thing. Linux also needs a transition period to adapt to this type of upgrade for the large number of application packages. Therefore, in recent years, the Stream version of CentOS is not recommended.

This behavior has been criticized by most developers and enterprises, and the community is already considering a CentOS like distribution, such as Rocky Linux. However, it will take time to verify the future development. If you’ve spent a lot of time upgrading your system, you’ll understand this feeling. Especially the official said that your system security patches do not give you to do, more maddening people.

In addition to red Hat series, there are many distributions of Linux. The management methods of software packages are generally divided into apt-get and YUM. Red Hat belongs to YUM series.

****Oracle Linux**** the most similar alternative to CentOS is Oracle Linux, but it is also built on RHEL and is not recommended

*Ubuntu* has both desktop and Server versions, and the desktop version has a bigger halo than the Server version, with some applications in the server environment but not many

*OpenSUSE* is less used in China and has a special package management mode, but it is widely used abroad

*Debian* An old Linux distribution, stable and reliable

*FreeBSD* Unix branch, stable and reliable, but has some compatibility issues with Linux software, not recommended

To sum up, it is recommended to take a wait-and-see approach and continue to use CentOS7 until 2024. In the long run, new alternatives will emerge in the next few years, and it will take a while for the community to choose between CentOS Stream and the open source clone Rocky Linux.

If CentOS is obsolete, it is recommended to use Debian as the primary Linux Server environment. Its package management tool is APT, the latest version is 9.9, and Ubuntu and other Linux have borrowed from it.

Xjjdog is a public account that doesn’t allow programmers to get sidetracked. Focus on infrastructure and Linux. Ten years architecture, ten billion daily flow, and you discuss the world of high concurrency, give you a different taste. My personal wechat xjjdog0, welcome to add friends, further communication.