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.
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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.
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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.
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Why CentOS Stream and the end of CentOS Linux doesn’t really matter

There were clones of — or more accurately downstream projects based on — Red Hat Enterprise Linux before Red Hat bought CentOS in 2014. CentOS started in 2006, and there have been other distributions based on RHEL. (My favorite is still Nux’s Stella from the CentOS 6 days.) There are many (many!) other Linux distributions and BSD projects that can supply a server or desktop operating system. Most of them are not owned by corporations that can limit their distribution on a whim.
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CentOS Stream and the end of the CentOS clone: perils, pitfalls, risks and opportunities for Red Hat

Red Hat unleashed the kraken with its recent announcement that its CentOS 8 clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux would be shut down in 2021 instead of 2029, to be replaced by the newish CentOS Stream 8.
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