FASTER, BETTER SERVERS!

As the dust settles following Red Hat’s winding down of CentOS, Jonni Bidwell looks for alternative server distributions.

- Jonni Bidwell

The winter of 2020 will be remembered by many as ‘not a particularly festive time’, but spare a thought for CentOS (the community-powered distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux), who were told unequivocally in December that further development would be axed.

Contrast this with the headlines of rosetinted 2014, when CentOS announced that it would be partnering with Red Hat, giving the company access to vast resources while still enabling it to remain an independent, community-driven project. Red Hat recognised the value in CentOS, which at the time of the union was the world’s most popular server distribution (Debian later reclaimed that prestigious title).

A lot can happen in a few years (Red Hat being bought by IBM, for example). Issues of governance, development and other foibles led to the partnership’s demise. Red Hat wanted its own CentOS Stream offering (and we’ll cover the intricacies behind this later) to be the go-to community enterprise distribution, and for it to function like Fedora used to, as a proving ground for new RHEL features. The Fedora umbrella now encompasses much more than servers, being a leader for Gnome and Wayland on the desktop, and taking on the skies with Fedora Cloud. CentOS Stream would then be a true, free upstream for RHEL, and as such would make the project more accessible to developers.