From the course: Learning CentOS Linux

What is CentOS?

From the course: Learning CentOS Linux

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What is CentOS?

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- [Voiceover] CentOS, or the Community Enterprise Operating System, is a popular Linux distribution. It's derived from, and is fully compatible, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And while Red Hat is only available to use commercially through a subscription service, CentOS is available freely. CentOS is community supported, which means that instead of requiring professional service contracts to get help and support, community members ranging from professional software developers who work for Red Hat, to system administrators in the industry, to Linux enthusiasts around the world, provide to CentOS users through a variety of means, including chat rooms and web forums. That's an important distinction. There's no service contract with CentOS like there is with Red Hat. If you have problems on a CentOS box, the community will try their best to help you out. But it's not a guaranteed contract sort-of thing. CentOS used to be an independent project, but in 2014, the project joined up with Red Hat officially. There's three distros of Linux in the Red Hat ecosystem: CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora. And they're arranged kind of like this. Fedora is used to test out new software, new systems, and things like that. Once the rough edges and bugs are worked out, some of those tools and choices make their way into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And once Red Hat is updated, the changes come to CentOS. It can appear that CentOS lags behind the newest and coolest software, and to some degree, it does. CentOS is boring in the best possible way. CentOS is where technologies that are well-established come to live for a long time. This makes CentOS a great choice for systems that will be up and running for a long time, where you know that there won't be big, breaking changes or updates that will change the way your systems work. CentOS version numbers mirror those of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So this version, 7.6, is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Releases tend to lag behind a few weeks to a few months as the CentOS team takes time to remove Red Hat branding and rebuild everything from Red Hat source code. As of this recording, CentOS 7.6 1810, has just launched in October of 2018. CentOS 7 will enjoy support until the end of 2020, and will receive maintenance updates until the end of June 2024. CentOS 7 has been the current version for a long time, since 2014 in fact, mirroring the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 has been the current version for a while as well. CentOS 7 will probably, eventually be replaced by CentOS 8. But as of this recording, there's not much authoritative information out there about it. Look for an update to this course after its release though. The combination of a rich support community, and a commitment to maintenance for reasonably long periods of time, make CentOS 7 a fantastic choice for businesses, schools, and other organizations who need to choose a standard platform for servers or desktops, and who don't want updates to change things radically. However, many organizations choose to blend CentOS with supported Red Hat systems, relying on Red Hat's enterprise support agreements to service critical or production systems. And using CentOS on development systems or other non-production hardware. This allows administrators to have one skill set that applies to both the production and development environments, and can help to optimize payment for support to just where it's really needed.

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