What is CentOS

The official website of CentOS is: CentOS Project.

The CentOS Project

Community-driven free software effort focused around the goal of providing a rich base platform for open source communities to build upon.

And CentOS is a vendor of Linux OS. They provide their variant of Linux OS as CentOS Linux. Also, CentOS Stream is provided. (They might be shorted as: cl and cs. )

End of Life

As announced in December of 2020, The CentOS Project has shifted focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. Here are the expected end of life (EOL) dates for our various releases.

• CentOS Linux 7 EOL: 2024-06-30
• CentOS Linux 8 EOL: 2021-12-31
• CentOS Stream 8 EOL: 2024-05-31
• CentOS Stream 9 EOL: estimated 2027, dependent on RHEL9 end of “Full Support Phase”

The major differences between CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream

1. Downstream vs. Upstream

   CentOS Linux is the rebuild version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux(RHEL). Hence, it’s the downstream. CentOS Stream is the Upstream of RHEL, thus it’s the version before the corresponding RHEL version.

   Specifically, CentOS Stream 8 is the upstream for the next minor release of RHEL 8, CentOS Stream 9 for the next minor release of RHEL 9, and so on.

2. Frequency of updates

   Changes made to CentOS Linux need to be uploaded to the upper project and be build as RHEL later. This cost an unnecessary period of time. While those made to CentOS Stream can be done directly, meaning to cut down lots of time.

   Thus, updates for CentOS Stream will be sooner to release. Which might indicates a higher frequency.

3. Testing

   See from the web yourself… web

Download CentOS Linux

The official website provides iso files and the torrent files. Some websites also provide images as alternatives, like Aliyun.

1. Official
2. Aliyun