Intro
As my devoted followers will be aware, I nearly kiled myself converting my Centos 6 VM to CentOS 8. For instance see Upgrading WordPress brings a thicket of problems. That is an experience I only want to go through every 10 years, and fortunately, CentOS was just the right platform as its support was supposed to last 10 years I started this blog in either 2011 I believe. I went to CentOS 8 in 2020.
But instead of eight more good years, I’ve learned that CentOS is basically a dead product. EOL in industry parlance. IBM killed it. The last upgrades to CentOS 8 came at the end of 2021. There is a sort of CentOS, now called CentOS Stream, but it should be basically thought of a another Fedora. Probably IBM was losing too much money with people choosing CentOS (free) over RedHat paid subscription.
But anyway, I’ve come to resent how out-of-date the packages are on CentOS and I am much more favorable to plain old Debian linux, largely due to my work on the Raspberry Pi. There the packages like python are much more uptodate. I guess the support is for five years.
The other VM I would consider for my next iteration is Amazon Linux. It has a lot of what I need already installed, so less fuss. But I think they’re only supported for three years.
Rocky Linux, the CentOS replacement
After three years I finally hard about the best CentOS replacement. Rocky Linux. I guess it’s still a bit obscure, but you can find it as an AMI on the marketplace. It has no cost and its stated aim is to be bug-for-bug compatible with Redhat! See the Wikipedia article.
References and related
There is a snarky commentary about this topic which inspired this article. I don’t have the link right now but it is enlightening. I will post it if I ever find it.