Who runs this site?⌗

My name is Steven Rosenberg. I’m a longtime Linux (and occasional BSD) user who is interested in CentOS Stream and what it means both for the enterprise-Linux ecosystem and the end user — especially those looking for a desktop distribution with lots of Fedora vibes but less churn and fewer full upgrades.

Contact me at centos@passthejoe.net.

What is this, anyway?⌗

This site aims to keep up with the news about the current release CentOS Stream 8 and the new CentOS Stream 9.

The backbone of the site are the lists of package updates that the CentOS Project (and by extreme proxy Red Hat) doesn’t provide in human-readable (and distributed) format.

Even though I complained about it plenty, it turns out that (now-former) CentOS community manager Rich Bowen had already written and distributed a Python script that pulls XML generated by the project and turns it into HTML and plain text that can be read.

For a while, I was using Rich’s script on my own Stream-powered desktop to generate the HTML and then create Hugo blog entries that contained the package-update information and upload them to my main Hugo blog.

I would run Rich’s script every day so I wouldn’t miss any changes. After doing this for weeks, I decided to try to write a script that would do the whole thing for me (and you).

I finally did it. I wrote a server-side Bash script that automatically produces a blog entry when there are package updates. (I will open-source the script when I get it in better shape.)

For now I copied some of my previous blog posts about CentOS onto this site, and I’m thinking about doing more CentOS content, whether that be traditional news posts or opinions, or just links to what others are writing.

It sounds weird, but I’ve had a lot of ups and downs — technically and emotionally — during my last seven months (as of November 2021) running CentOS Stream 8. Maybe I have a problem understading Red Hat/RHEL culture and how it differs from what happens over at Fedora (or Debian, for that matter).

The way Twitter works seems to encourage complaining, and oftentimes people from CentOS/Red Hat aren’t very good at heading off (or dealing with) the waves of criticism that have come their way. In any case, despite my previous reservations on how things are done (or how those processes are mysterious), I’m appreciating all the technical excellence that goes into CentOS Stream (and RHEL … and eventually to downstreams that now include Rocky and Alma).

When I first looked at CentOS Stream, I wanted something that at least resembled what a Fedora LTS would look like. I think I have that in Stream, and at this point I believe all the Red Hatters who say things will be better in all ways (especially procedures and infrastructure) when CentOS Stream 9 is released.

I have already participated in Stream development through bug reports, and the procedure is exactly like that for Fedora, where my experiences have always been positive. That’s part of the Fedora vibes — thanks, Red Hat!

I use Stream as a desktop operating system, and my wish/goal is for more people to give CentOS a try on their laptops and desktops. I have been pretty much beating on the Stream 8 installation on my HP laptop for months now, and I am impressed by what Red Hat is doing. You might be, too.

Update on July 29, 2022: I’m not using CentOS Stream at present. My current systems run Fedora (laptop) and Debian (desktop). I think that CentOS Stream 9 is doing a lot better than Stream 8 in that it is a true upstream to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 — for the most part.

There haven’t been almost any CVEs in the Linux kernel lately, so it’s hard to track Stream 9 in terms of how it’s doing on security for the kernel. But I do see a lot of activity, and that is good.

From all of my observations (aided by the data colleted on this site as compared with security reports linked on LWN.net, CentOS Stream 9 (especially) is treated by Red Hat much like Debian Testing. You get many new packages (features and bug fixes) well before RHEL. But when it comes to security patches — and especially critical vulnerabiities — that work is done in RHEL and makes its way to CentOS Stream only after a delay.

My sense of things in 2022, with Stream 9 up and running, is that you probably only want to run it if you are developing (or testing) Stream 9 itself. For other computing uses where you want an enterprise Linux system for personal, business, research or other real-world uses, rright now downstream clones AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux — as well as RHEL itself — seem like better choices.