Red Hat and CentOS today announced the general availability of CentOS Linux 8 and the new CentOS Stream. The announcement was made via the CentOS mailing list by Karanbir Singh, project lead for the CentOS Project. It is reproduced in part below.

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CentOS Linux 8

This is the first release for CentOS Linux 8 and is version marked as 8.0-1905, derived from sources published by Red Hat, delivered via git.centos.org

First, please read through the release notes at: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOSLinux8 – these notes contain important information about the release and details about some of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from the users and should be the first port of call for anyone looking to use CentOS Linux 8.

CentOS Stream

When the CentOS Project announced it was joining forces with Red Hat in January 2014, we put an emphasis on how the new relationship would “(drive) forward development and adoption of next-generation open source technologies.”

In the intervening years, the Project has grown to deliver not just a Linux distribution, but an entire set of sub-communities using new
services in support of development work done on top of that distro.

Special interest groups (SIGs) have provided a base for layered projects to develop on a stable platform. Additionally, CI/CD, the community build system, better Git repository hosting, and container pipelines, amongst others, have brought modern code and development practices to the broader CentOS community.

With the introduction of CentOS Stream we are excited to continue working with Red Hat to bring you the biggest step forward the CentOS Project has ever undertaken.

CentOS Stream is a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.

In practice, CentOS Stream will contain the code being developed for the next minor RHEL release. This development model will allow the community to discuss, suggest, and contribute features and fixes into RHEL more quickly.

To do this, Red Hat Engineering is planning to move parts of RHEL development into the CentOS Project in order to collaborate with everyone on updates to RHEL.

There will not be a CentOS Stream for versions released in the past, this is only a forward-looking version target.

Please read through the release notes at: http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOSStream – these notes contain important information about the release and details about some of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from the users.

Updates, Sources and DebugInfos

Updates for both distributions are being built and will be online in the next few days to catchup. Sources and debuginfo for all the released content is also available online at mirror.centos.org and vault.centos.org;

In the coming days, we will work to get the cbs.centos.org service enabled for both the new distributions, and encourage the SIG’s to start considering their executions plans forward.

Chris Wright, Red Hat President and CTO, shares additional information in a blog post: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/transforming-development-experience-within-centos

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Source: Red Hat