CentOS 8 alternatives

Many people are unhappy about the decision from the CentOS Board of Directors, to switch from fix releases to Stream and cutting the support date from 2029 to 31st of December 2021 for CentOS 8.

Many applications in productive environments require fix OS releases. Having more or less daily changing packages can cause many issues.

People who have upgraded from CentOS 7 to 8 are in trouble again, the cut on the support date means, they have to think about alternatives and migrate to another Linux distribution in short time.

What alternatives exist to CentOS 8 now?

RHEL 8

For small environments up to 16 systems, Red Hat offers to license them for free, so for small environments RHEL 8 is one alternative.

Anouncing the change on CentOS 8 switching to Stream without announcing this possibility is the reason for many rumors.

Oracle Linux 8

Oracle has taken this ball and offers a shell script to migrate existing CentOS installations to Oracle Linux, till now no limitations.

Running for example PostgreSQL installations on Oracle Linux may be a bit ironic.

openSUSE Leap 15.3

SUSE has also taken up this point, with openSUSE Leap 15.3 SUSE has switched the method how they build from Leap 15.2 to Leap 15.3 to the way CentOS has left.

Till openSUSE Leap 15.2:

Details here.

Starting with openSUSE Leap 15.3:

Details here

So openSUSE Leap with Release 15.3 becomes also an interesting alternative to CentOS 8 and is worth to take a look at in my mind.

Here we have fixed Releases once a year based on an Enterprise Release, thats what CentOS gives up with the switch to Stream on CentOS 8.

A problem may be the short time to support end after a new release is coming out, this is short with about six month.