As most people know, CentOS 8 as we know it will end in December 2021, has there been any talk around which operating system will be its successor? The two that I have heard of that seem to show the most promise are AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. Both have recently been fully released as version 8.3 and seem to be a solid replacement for CentOS. Is there a leader or a preference to either one at this time?
To date we have discussed this in a few of our Infrastructure SIG meetings and have only discussed CentOS 8 stream (and implemented) and started CentOS 9 stream as OSes that would be tested and documented. We can add this as a topic for future meetings.
I was able to successfully install a simple default Katello 4.0.1 deployment on AlmaLinux 8.3 without any issues while following the CentOS 8 documentation.
Today we have nightly and 2.5 pipelines to verify installation passes on CentOS Stream. I did manual testing of 2.4 on Stream. So yes, Stream will be a supported install target. Once it shows up, I hope we can soon add Stream 9 as well.
To be clear, we are not building on CentOS Stream 8. Currently all builds run on CentOS Linux 8. There is still discussion about which build platform to use once it goes EOL. Building on Stream means we will become incompatible with RHEL (and its clones) at times. This is still an open debate, but compatibility with RHEL is important.