This Linux distribution also closely follows the RHEL release cycle using the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) produced by Oracle. Oracle Linux claims to be 100% compatible with existing applications on your CentOS server.
REDHAT LINUX VS CENTOS FREE
Oracle’s Linux distro is available free of charge, and they’ve created a conversion script to switch your CentOS Linux server over to Oracle Linux. Hopefully, they will keep the promise on their homepage – “Always free, always open source.” – and it does not devolve into a bunch of paid addons. cPanel recently made this statement: “We have made the commitment to support the RHEL fork by CloudLinux.”Ĭons: Not pioneers of free software. So if you run cPanel on CentOS, this may be of interest to you. The popular cPanel & WHM supports installation on CentOS, RHEL, and CloudLinux OS. Pros: Led by Cloudlinux, whose distro is widely used by shared hosting providers. This distro is another free OS, with $1M in annual sponsorship from CloudLinux, which has promised to “support future RHEL releases by updating AlmaLinux.” The expected release date is Q1, 2021. Pros: Led by the founder of the CentOS project, has the most buzz and community support thus far.Ĭons: ETA of March 31st, 2021, for an initial release, will this new distro catch on and last another ten years?ĪlmaLinux is the latest RHEL clone created by CloudLinux. The current ETA for the initial release is March 31, 2021. Rocky Linux aims to function as a downstream build as CentOS had done previously, building releases after they have been added by the upstream vendor, not before. It is a community-enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with RHEL. Rocky Linux is a fork of CentOS led by the founder of the CentOS project. Moreover, there are additional alternatives.Īs such, let’s have a look at viable CentOS alternatives and begin our research, discussion, and decision-making, before the December 31st, 2021 deadline.ĬentOS Alternative Distributions Rocky Linux In response to the termination of CentOS as we know it, CentOS founder, Gregory Kurtzer, created a successor to the original mission of CentOS, then shortly afterward, CloudLinux also announced a new CentOS clone. A CentOS alternative should offer long-term support, and of equal importance, it should be very stable. With Red Hat’s move, CentOS departs from being an extremely stable, community-supported, and RHEL compatible distro to an early rolling-release distro for RHEL, namely CentOS Stream.Īs such, many users, including myself, are looking for CentOS alternatives. They also announced that support would be shifting to a CentOS alternative rolling-release Linux distribution, midstream between the upstream development in Fedora and the downstream development for RHEL.ĬentOS was and still is a very commonly used production-ready Linux server distribution. However, in December 2020, Red Hat requisitioned that CentOS terminate the development of CentOS 8.