As we all know, CentOS 8 had reached its EOL on the 31st of December 2021. Now CentOS is itself moving from being downstream to RHEL release to an upstream development branch of RHEL.

Upstream vs downstream

CentOS Linux is a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As such, it is downsteam from RHEL. CentOS Linux release version numbers reflect the date of the RHEL release on which they are based.

CentOS Stream, on the other hand, is the upstream, public development branch for RHEL. Specifically, CentOS Stream 8 is the upstream for the next minor release of RHEL 8, CentOS Stream 9 for the next minor release of RHEL 9, and so on.

Upgrading from CentOS 8 to CentOS 8 stream

Please refer to our complete step by step guide on how to upgrade from CentOS 8 to CentOS 8 Stream.

Downgrading from CentOS 8 stream to CentOS 8

As mentioned above, CentOS 8 stream is the upstream for the next minor release of RHEL 8. So, what if there is something that you need as a mandatory feature, which is missing in CentOS 8 Stream and don’t find it?

Follow these steps to downgrade from CentOS 8 stream to CentOS 8.

1. Check the current version of CentOS

sudo cat /etc/os-release

2. Remove the centos-stream package

sudo dnf remove centos-stream-release

You will recieve a message like “Problem: The operation would result in removing the following protected packages: setup”

So take a backup of your current yum setup and re-run the command

sudo dnf remove centos-stream-release

3. Copy the repository files from a new CentOS 8 installation to /etc/yum.repos.d/ . You can download it from here.

4. Resync the CentOS 8 distro

sudo dnf distro-sync --releasever 8

5. Finally reboot the server

reboot

6. Welcome back to CentOS 8. Check the current version of CentOS

sudo cat /etc/os-release

And you are moved back to CentOS 8