While the majority of the Linux blogosphere (including me) was focused at the end of support for Windows 10, We forgot to take into account an end of support closer to home. In this post we will see why to go from CentOS 7 to Ubuntu 24.04.
CentOS It was long the choice of many web hosting providers and SMEs for its web servers since it provided features similar to those of Red Hat Enterprise Linux without the need to pay for the license.
The CentOS change
CentOS was born in 2004 as a community distribution based on the independent compilation of the Red Hat source code, a distribution aimed at the enterprise market that charged a subscription for support. As time went by, Red Hat became a sponsor of the project to the point that, as can be read on the project website:
The CentOS Board of Directors is made up of members of the CentOS Project, many of whom have been present since the creation of the Project, as well as new members from Red Hat who have been instrumental in creating this new relationship.
In 2018, IBM bought Red Hat as part of redefining its business towards the cloud and Artificial Intelligence. That included a series of changes that the red hat company explained in a statement
The technological world we face today is not as simple as it was a year ago, much less five years ago. From containerized applications and cloud-native services to rapid hardware innovations and the shift of ecosystems to software as a service (SaaS), the operating system can be stretched thin to respond to even one of these needs, especially scale and sensitively.
As part of that process, the following change was announced:
The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we will shift focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which sits just ahead of a current version of RHEL.
Basically CentOS Stream is Red Hat's testbed, which includes applications that, once proven to be stable, will be included in the enterprise distribution. In other words, it no longer had the stability that companies need.
Why move from CentOS 7 to Ubuntu 24.04
CentOS It was released in July 2014 and maintained active support until 2020. Therefore, it is the last of the versions that was developed and released before IBM's purchase of Red Hat. Until July of this year it has maintenance support, this is security patches and bug fixes. Although version 8 was almost completely developed before the acquisition, by the time it was released it had been finalized.
Although there are several distributions that have picked up where CentOS left off, there are very good reasons to move to Ubuntu 24.04.
- Free download of distribution and updates from servers located throughout the world.
- Update support for 10 years: Free up to 5 teams. Payment above that amount.
- Support extended by two years traditional after that time for paid subscribers.
- Wide availability of documentation and tutorials on the Internet.
- Ability to install security updatesin restart the computer
It should be mentioned that Ubuntu, Being based on Debian, it uses a different package system than Red Hat-based distributions, so some planning is required to make the pass.
other alternatives
If you don't want such a drastic change, you can opt for one of these variants:
- RockyLinux: It's all in the family because this distribution was created by Gregory Kurtzer, original co-founder of CentOS. It offers a free and open source version compatible with Red Hat, and includes a migration script from CentOS.
- AlmaLinux: It is a fork of CentOS intended to be used by web hosting providers.