Migrating from CentOS 7

For years, CentOS was the operating system of choice for users who needed a free enterprise Linux solution. CentOS offered a predictable life cycle and a long lifespan for each release, making it a reliable alternative to the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. That all changed in 2020 when Red Hat replaced CentOS 8 with CentOS Stream and announced that CentOS 7 would reach end of life on June 30, 2024.

Despite its name, CentOS Stream does not serve as a replacement for CentOS. While CentOS sat downstream of RHEL, making it a reliable replacement for RHEL, CentOS Stream sits upstream and serves as a developmental platform for RHEL contributors. As a result, Red Hat has warned that CentOS Stream is not considered stable for production environments [1].

As one would expect from the open source community, CentOS alternatives started popping up almost immediately after this announcement. One of these alternatives, AlmaLinux [2], quickly stepped in as a replacement for CentOS by offering 1:1 bug compatibility with RHEL by early 2021, eventually moving to application binary interface compatibility in 2023 when Red Hat restricted access to RHEL source code. Today, AlmaLinux provides an alternative for former CentOS users as a forever-free, community-governed, production-grade platform focused on long-term stability.

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