CentOS will focus on Stream releases and no longer focus on RHEL rebuilds

CentOS developers are now focusing on CentOS Stream, the software that can be regarded as a preview of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS Linux 8 is the latest rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat sees CentOS, or Community ENTerprise Operating System, as a platform for innovation on the one hand and stability on the other. The focus on Stream should help the diverse group of large business users to quickly integrate the software into production environments. This reports Red Hat, which adds that Facebook already uses operating systems based on CentOS Stream for its servers and Intel is also behind the strategy change.

That change means that CentoS no longer includes rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The project will focus entirely on delivering an upstream development platform from RHEL and thus be at the forefront of the stable releases of that Linux distro.

Red Hat announced CentOS Stream in September last year and now sees sufficient reason to focus all its internal projects on this. According to the company, Stream is the future of Linux for the enterprise market and customers could directly influence RHEL’s direction with it.

Red Hat emphasizes that CentOS cannot be regarded as a beta platform for RHEL and that the software is expected to contain fewer bugs because it will receive fixes and functions earlier. The move means that CentOS Linux 8, the RHEL 8 rebuild, will stop at the end of 2021. Red Hat is sticking to the CentOS Linux support cycle.