CentOS Stream 8

Mayank Sharma takes a look at the distro that has the open source community up in arms, to see what the hullabaloo is all about.

- Mayank Sharma

IN BRIEF

CentOS Stream began life as a sibling to the main CentOS edition in 2019 as a means of influencing the development of RHEL. But in a hotly debated decision the distro has overthrown its mature sibling to establish itself as the defacto CentOS release going forward.

SPECS

Minimum

CPU: 1.5GHz

Memory: 2GB

Hard disk drive: 10GB

Build: 64-bit x86, ARM64 and IBM Power

Late last year, the Red Hat sponsored CentOS project announced that it was refocusing its efforts behind the newly introduced CentOS Stream distro. In essence it killed the beloved and highly stable server distro with what is essentially a rolling release.

In the Red Hat universe, Fedora existed as the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which then served as the upstream for CentOS. This made it one of the most popular community-supported server distros as it promised the stability and innovations of RHEL without the cost.