Is CentOS really going EOL?

[jfha73]

I have been seeing a post from RedHat saying that CentOS EOL is coming soon, is this true? No more CentOS when that happens.

[TrevorH]

Correct. It would seem that you haven't been paying attention - Red Hat announced at the end of 2020 that they were canning the CentOS project as-was and replacing it with "CentOS Stream" which is a permanent beta product in which RH test fixes that will be in the _next_ version of RHEL. Those are often broken and thus Stream is not suitable for production use.

CentOS 7 continued as-is but that was already scheduled to go end of life in June 2024 and will still do so in about 3 months time.

CentOS 8 went EOL at the end of 2021 and CentOS Stream 8 will do so about 3 weeks before CentOS 7 goes away. There was never a CentOS 9, only a CentOS Stream 9 and that will continue (as a beta) until the EOL date for that is hit 5 years after it was first released in 2022.

After the RH 2020 announcement several new RHEL rebuild distros sprang up, independent of RH although still requiring access to the source code that RH use to build RHEL. They have also tried to restrict access to that but so far both main rebuilds - Alma and Rocky Linux - have managed to continue. If you need a RHEL rebuild then Alma and Rocky aim to continue to provide a replacement.