CentOS Linux 8 Reached End of Life, It’s Time to Migrate to an Alternative OS

CentOS Linux 8

The CentOS Linux 8 operating system series reached end of life on December 31st, 2021, and it’s time to migrate your installations to an alternative distribution like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux OS.

The time has come to say goodbye to the CentOS Linux 8 distribution as it reached end of life on the last day of 2021, December 31st. As of today, the distribution is no longer supported, which means that it will no longer receive software and security updates, making your installations vulnerable to attacks, in time.

CentOS Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution built using and compatible with the sources of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. CentOS Linux 8 was initially released only two years ago, on September 24th, 20219, and it was supposed to be maintained for 10 years, until the year 2029.

A year ago, on December 8th, 2020, Red Hat announced that it will put an end to the CentOS 8 series at the end of 2021, focusing their development on a new upstream development platform called CentOS Stream.

But, according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream is not an alternative to CentOS Linux 8 or any other supported CentOS Linux series. Therefore, the time has come to migrate to an alternative free operating system, such as Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux OS.

Both Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux OS are great open-source, enterprise-ready, and server-oriented alternatives to CentOS 8, but before deciding which one is the best for your machines, make sure that you make a full backup of your most important files!

To migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux, you can use a free tool called migrate2rocky, following the migration instructions provided by the Rocky Linux development team here.

To migrate from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux OS, you can use a free tool called almalinux-deploy, following the migration instructions provided by the AlmaLinux OS development team here.

Both distributions provide full CentOS 8 support, along with many other extra features that weren’t available in the CentOS 8 operating system series. It’s your job to choose the best CentOS 8 alternative for your hardware, so take some to study them before migrating your installations.

Last updated 2 years ago

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