While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's [1]RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9.

The introduction of CentOS Stream 9 comes ahead of CentOS Linux 8 reaching end-of-life at year's end. CentOS Stream 9 is summed up in today's announcement in relation to RHEL9 as:

CentOS Stream is a continuous-delivery distribution serving as the next point-release of RHEL. Before a package is formally introduced to CentOS Stream, it undergoes a battery of tests and checks–both automated and manual–to ensure it meets the stringent standards for packages to be included in RHEL. Updates posted to CentOS Stream are identical to those posted to the unreleased minor version of RHEL. The aim? For CentOS Stream to be as fundamentally stable as RHEL itself.

To achieve this stability, each major version of CentOS Stream starts from a stable release of Fedora–In CentOS Stream 9, this begins with Fedora 34, which is the same code base from which RHEL 9 is built. As updated packages pass testing and meet standards for stability, they are pushed into CentOS Stream as well as the nightly build of RHEL. What you see in CentOS Stream now is what RHEL will look like in the future.

Or there is this visualization from the CentOS Project showing the trajectory of CentOS Stream 9 from its branching off Fedora 34 through the future in being the leading edge of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 development.

In today's [2]CentOS.org announcement it continues to promote CentOS Stream as being community-focused and forward-looking while fundamentally should be as reliable as RHEL itself sans any official support.

CentOS Stream 9 can be downloaded from [3]CentOS.org .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-RHEL9-Beta

[2] https://blog.centos.org/2021/12/introducing-centos-stream-9/?utm_source=phx

[3] https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/