CentOS8 was released not too long ago by the RedHat ppl and after giving it some time to mature a bit I decided to take a closer look at it.
Reading online about it I noticed they changed some stuff and improved other stuff but overall there’s not much I can call “special” about it (not trying to be a hater or anything)
I see they decided to use nftables (not a bad move), nmcli (network manager) now seems to be at the core of all network settings, they decided to go with kernel 4.18 (wtf ? why ?), switched from yum to dnf (not a bad move), they tightened security a bit and used newer package versions (php 7.2, apache 2.4, etc)
Other than that I noticed something called “cockpit” which allows one to manage the OS via a basic web interface (not bad, not bad at all) and apparently now they have a rolling release model (which Gentoo started doing doing many many many many years ago) which is also not bad.
Because I’m crazy, at some point in time I decided to install CentOS7 on my work laptop, and also because I’m crazy I decided to do an in-place upgrade from C7 to C8.
These are the steps I followed (based on a guide I found on techmint -> https://www.tecmint.com/upgrade-centos-7-to-centos-8/)
If you’re feeling brave sudo/su to root and run following commands:
yum install epel-release -y yum install yum-utils yum install rpmconf rpmconf -a package-cleanup --leaves package-cleanup --orphans yum install dnf dnf -y remove yum yum-metadata-parser rm -Rf /etc/yum dnf upgrade dnf install http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/centos-repos-8.1-1.1911.0.8.el8.x86_64.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/centos-release-8.1-1.1911.0.8.el8.x86_64.rpm http://mirror.centos.org/centos/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/Packages/centos-gpg-keys-8.1-1.1911.0.8.el8.noarch.rpm -y dnf -y upgrade https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm dnf clean all rpm -e `rpm -q kernel` rpm -e --nodeps sysvinit-tools dnf -y --releasever=8 --allowerasing --setopt=deltarpm=false distro-sync dnf -y install kernel-core dnf -y groupupdate "Core" "Minimal Install"
It did not go as planned in my case – because I had a ton of packages installed from various repos like remi,nux,etc not to mention the custom compiled stuff I had which I had to remove during the upgrade because it was causing conflicts – BUT I was able to complete the process successfully (eventually) and am now running:
$ cat /etc/centos-release
CentOS Linux release 8.1.1911 (Core)
I don’t trust the CentOS ppl enough to switch to the Stream version just yet but will do so after it’s been around for about 1 year or more and when I do I’ll share my experience here.
This is what I think about C8 in one sentence: “Good effort but I’m not impressed.”