CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

By limiting the RHEL public sources to CentOS Stream, it will now be more difficult for community/off-shoot enterprise Linux distributions like Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux, etc, to provide 1:1 binary compatible builds against given RHEL releases.

If you’ve been following the way Red Hat has been moving CentOS from being a downstream distro to RHEL to making it the upstream community distro with the start of CentOS Stream, you’d know the major shift in Red Hat’s strategy to cater more to the paying customers and partners and killing the spirit of continuing to remain a community enterprise operating system.

“As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.” said Mike McGrath, Red Hat VP of Core Platforms.

We’ll now have to wait and watch the path that will be taken by AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, the 2 most popular community RHEL distros that were started since the time CentOS was moved upstream.

Both Rocky Linux as well as AlmaLinux have tweeted asking their community to not panic and a solution will soon be found.

With the recent GA announcements of RedHat 8.8 as well as its upstream alternatives Rocky Linux 8.8 and AlmaLinux 8.8 one can now finally update Linux offline!

With this enhancement, you can apply offline updates to RHEL by using the new yum offline-upgrade command.

There are times when you have too many services running on the system and many services that need stopping or restarting post the updates do not stop or restart within the timeout defined for the yum upgrade packages, which causes the yum upgrade command to fail.

The one easy solution for this is to reboot into the minimal mode, where only the most necessary services needed for Linux to run, will be running. This solution has been put to practice for the command yum offline-upgrade.

To fix this issue, you can simply run yum offline-upgrade download. On running this, yum will download all the package updates onto the system the usual way. Then you need to run yum offline-upgrade reboot. The system will now reboot into a minimal mode, install the updated packages that were downloaded earlier and then reboot back into the normal mode.

To start with RedHat is most known for its association with RedHat Enterprise Linux and is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and CentOS Stream along with many other open source projects. Redhat Inc. was acquired by IBM in 2019 and is now operated as an independent subsidiary of IBM.

Why would the same company want to maintain 3 Linux operating systems?

To start with, all the 3 of these Linux distributions use the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) packages. Most of the packages can be used interchangebly amongst these Linux distributions. So in order to understand the basic difference between them, we need to first understand the difference between a community distribution (commonly called as distro) and an enterprise distribution.

Community vs enterprise distro

Linux as we all know is a free and open source operating system. Which means anybody who understands it well enough can develop features into a distro and add it to the repository for it to become a part of the upcoming release. This ensures that you always have the bleeding edge features in community based distro. However, it does come with a drawback, that the new features may not have been tested well, so an updated would be soon on its way. This causes stability issues from an enterprise perspective. Enterprises prefer to have fixed periodic update cycles with a long term support (LTS). This is where comes the enterprise Linux distro. Enterprise Linux distros are tested with wider audience, features are stabilised and only then are added to the final release.

Fedora release cycle

Fedora Linux falls under the category of community Linux distro. They have a release cycle of around 6 months with the support for the current version being valid till a month after the release of the next version.

CentOS Stream release cycle

CentOS release cycle matches with that of Redhat releases. The major version number matches that of the major release of Redhat, while the minor version number being the actual release update. Starting with CentOS Stream, it is now an upstream Linux distro to Redhat.

Redhat release cycle

Redhat is a commercial enterprise linux distro with fixed release and support cycles. Red Hat releases a new point version of a particular series every year and a major version after approximately 5 years. It offers 10-year life cycle support so you can better support long-term apps.

Upstream vs Downstream distro

The development and release cycle of a Linux distro can be compared also whether it is upstream to Redhat or downstream to Redhat.

The bleeding edge upstream is Fedora. Fedora matures into CentOS stream. CentOS Stream is a “continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora and Redhat distros. With CentOS only recently moving to upstream releases to Redhat, it will be worth keeping a watch on how often do the releases happen in CentOS Stream.

Since in upstream, CentOS Stream lies between Fedora and Redhat, it is expected to have releases more often than Redhat, however lesser often as compared to Fedora. CentOS Stream 9 releases will give a better picture towards this.

And then there are downstream distros which were launched after Redhat announced the change in the stance of CentOS from the earlier downstream distro to upstream, from its CentOS Stream. These distros are Rocky Linux (by the founder of CentOS Project) and Alma Linux (from the house of CloudLinux). They are also gaining wide spread popularity, as they track close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are as stable as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are free to use.

You can read more about whether to opt for CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux before making up your mind for your next installation.