Bye, Bye CentOS 8 with 2021 !!! Thanks for Everything. Best Alternative?

Finally, Today is 31 December 2021 last day of the year and CentOS 8 End of Life. When we say bye to 2021 we will say goodbye to our CentOS 8 as well.

From 2004 to till now CentOS was used by many system administrators and companies. Even most open-source applications are still working on CentOS 8 till Dec 2021 application has not been migrated from CentOS to another OS or alternative of application.  Here I am talking about applications or solutions which some companies provide in an ovf or ova formate for VMware. After deployment, we got CentOS 8 even some paid tools as well.

2020  Dec Redhat Announced CentOS 8 EOL in Dec 2021 it was a deep loss for mostly Administrators and tool developers because it has supported them for 16 years in their administrator and developer journey. Even many organizations are relying on CentOS. Administrators know how to work is easily done on CentOS instead of RHEL. Even CentOS is forked by RHEL binary to binary. This is because we have more customization freedom on CentOS and all repo packaged already provided on CentOS. RHEL admins know that even a separate package installation can make REDHAT decline for support.

If you are using CentOS 7 then no need to change or upgrade OS urgently because CentOS 7  EOL is June 2024. Still, you have 4 years with your favorite CentOS 7. But for CentOS 8 today is the last day and maybe in the new year, 2022 vulnerability scanners show it as a vulnerability due to no support from the community.

Redhat has given the option also to switch from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream is like the RHEL beta version. For test environments, it could be the best option.

So what next do we have to switch CentOS stream or RHEL  or any other option?

What is the best replacement for CentOS 8?

We have many options because we know the new Linux distro launch every month or week we can say. But for CentOS 8 replacement there are two options that suit better for replacement.

Alternatives

Rocky Linux

Rocky Linux is one of the best alternatives with bug-to-bug compatibility and it is created under the supervision of the same person Gregory Kurtzer who was responsible for CentOS birth. The best part is that this time Rocky Linux does not repeat the same mistake which was done at the time of CentOS which leads Redhat to takeover CentOS and not CentOS is dead or we can say the change in the lifecycle. Rocky Linux has registered its own trademark and done changes in RHEL forked version also. This is the reason before Rocky there are other distros released and Rocky Linux has taken its own time. Last month 25 Nov Rocky has celebrated its first anniversary .

Alma Linux

Alma is forked RHEL and created its own brand of Alma Linux it is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL. It is funded by Cloudlinux but it is completely free and own by the community. This distro is a complete copy of RHEL you will not feel any difference only the name and some files. Till now alma gives a faster version release compared to Rocky or other distributions.

These two distros you can migrate from CentOS to Rocky or Alma in a very smooth way. Your data will not be lost. There are other alternatives also available Springdale, Oracle Linux, etc. After CentOS, you have to distro hopping if you have not decided till now.

Conclusion

CentOS 8 Linux has changed its lifecycle and from 1 Jan 2022 CentOS 8 life has been ended. A relief for CentOS users it’s EOL is June 2022. So you have sufficient time to think about your new distro. We have alternatives available like Rocky or Alma which is easy to migratable from CentOS.

Last we want to thank the CentOS community for maintaining and distributing an awesome distro.