CentOS 7 has reached end of support since June 30, 2024 (CentOS 8 was prematurely cut off, reaching end of life in 2021 as per Red Hat’s policy), leaving no CentOS distributions in the support pipeline (morphing into CentOS Stream as the upstream distro for RHEL instead).
Former CentOS users now have to either pay to upgrade to RHEL 7, supported until 2028, or migrate to alternative distributions such as AlmaLinux, Cloud Linux, Rocky Linux, all of which are based on CentOS 8, meaning an upgrade from version 7 to 8 is necessary.
CentOS, short for Community Enterprise Operating System, was established in 2004 by compiling the source code of RHEL into binaries, becoming a no-cost alternative for those wanting to use RHEL without hefty expenses. However, the project was acquired by Red Hat in 2014 and continued for some time until Red Hat changed its policy to discontinue CentOS in 2020.
Source: Red Hat
New relationship hierarchy: Fedora > CentOS Stream > RHEL
TLDR: CentOS 7 and 8 have reached end of support, pushing users towards RHEL, alternative distributions, or crossing version upgrades.
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