Goodbye CentOS Stream 8. I guess we didn’t click.
My expectations for CentOS Stream 8 were high — mainly because Red Hat is the biggest Linux company in the world by orders of magnitude. And after imploring thousands of CentOS Linux 8 users to migrate to Stream, they had an obligation to make it great. That didn’t happen. I moved on, and I think the project was happy to see me go. I was too loud.
I try to play the guitar every day
Even if only for a few minutes, I try to pick up the guitar every day.
Not a review of CentOS Stream 8
I have so many notes. I started running CentOS Stream 8 five months ago, and I wanted to document every win, loss, setback and solution as I tried to make what isn’t really a desktop distribution — Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its clones) — into my laptop operating system.
I’m not going to look at my notes. This non-review won’t write itself, and the notes aren’t going to do it for me.
The 2021 Linux laptop rebuild
CentOS Stream 8 — a controversial yet boring Linux — would be my new operating system After holding up due to indecision, I went ahead with the Linux laptop rebuild.
I decided to give CentOS Stream 8 a try. It’s a “hot” Linux distro. But for all the wrong reasons. I can say now that it’s technically excellent, with the extremely notable exception of an error in the Boot ISO (yes, I filed a bug) that makes it impossible to proceed before figuring out and manually entering a URL for a working mirror and then a regression in Mutter that killed Files/Nautilus for a day or so until I figured out a workaround.
Pausing the Linux rebuild
I was all ready to crack open the HP Envy 15 laptop this afternoon, pull the 250 GB NVMe M.2 SSD and replace it with a 1 TB model. While in there, I planned to replace the battery, which has a dead cell.
But I decided to press “pause.”
I started running Linux on this particular laptop in 2019 (??) with Debian Stable (then Buster), replacing it with Testing (Bullseye) maybe a couple of months ago.