When I looked for torrents of CentOS in the usual places, I didn’t see them for CentOS Stream 8. But they exist, as fellow CentOS super fan Scott Williams points out.

If enough others are seeding the torrents, they could be very useful, since the “DVD” image of CentOS is a bandwidth-hogging 10GB. That’s bigger than an actual DVD disc from back in the day, but since nobody is burning optical discs, I’ll file that fun fact under whatevs.

For those who want torrents of CentOS Stream 8 (and for some reason every CentOS release since 3.8), the .torrent files live here.

Another aside: I remember installing CentOS 3 many years ago in my burn-everything, run-everything Linux phase (which pretty much everybody has, right?). It was old even then, but it’s something that CentOS has been around that long.

And another: My perceptions of the enterprise Linux clone landscape in general — and CentOS in particular — are very much colored by Stella, the CentOS 6 remix in which one man basically packaged everything a desktop user would want that wasn’t already in the distro itself or EPEL at that time.

Stella was also a live ISO. I wish CentOS itself provided a live environment, but thankfully we have that from AlmaLinux, whose new live image will come in very useful for testing hardware compatibility before committing to an installation of any of the RHEL downstreams, or the “pretty much upstream, except for the kernel … we think” CentOS Stream.

In case you haven’t figured it out, one of the purposes of this blog is for me to encourage others to follow along and give CentOS Stream a try as your desktop operating system. I get a lot of positive Fedora-like vibes that overshadow the occasional mild gaslighting that exists in almost every big free-software project. (My current fa orite is when people who really don’t know what they’re talking about try to convince others that there’s a reason for Debian’s Chromium package to be multiple months out of date and why that’s a-OK. tl;dr: It isn’t.)

So here’s my homework for neckbeards (and those who think like them):

  • If someone has a complaint about your project, try to see their point of view. If you don’t know what gaslighting is, look it up, and if what you’re about to say matches that description, say something else.
  • If someone asks for a feature/package/fix, don’t suggest that they write the code themselves, because if they had any idea how to do that, they probably would.

Disclaimer: So many CentOS and Fedora users and Red Hat employees have been very nice and helpful to me. I’ve received many useful links and hints — and somebody even made an EPEL package for me. I hope to return the favors.