Appendix: Converting CentOS 8 to Alternative Distro

CentOS 8 has reached its official End Of Life phase and now exists only in archived form at https://vault.centos.org/. To access software updates that track RHEL8 to one degree or another, you should convert to an alternative distribution.

Some alternatives choices are:

Red Hat RHEL 8

RHEL is the original source base of every CentOS release, so RHEL 8 is an obvious alternative to CentOS 8. Accessing the RHEL 8 repositories requires a paid subscription. Additionally, some RPMs found in the CentOS repository for a particular release are only found in the Red Hat EPEL repository. Contact Red Hat for details.

CentOS Stream 8

The CentOS Project recommends transitioning CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream 8. The CentOS Project defines that repository as containing RPMs that are in a development phase between a RHEL clone and the somewhat more experimental Fedora, i.e., as a form of "beta" release candidates for the next RHEL release.

The CentOS Project describes this transition at https://www.centos.org/news-and-events/convert-to-stream-8/ which today consists of two commands:

dnf --disablerepo '*' --enablerepo extras swap centos-linux-repos centos-stream-repos
dnf distro-sync

Rocky 8

Penguin Computing currently suggests considering Rocky 8 as a distribution similar to CentOS, i.e., tracking every new RHEL 8 release within days. See https://rockylinux.org/ for details.

See https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky-tools/tree/main/migrate2rocky for details about a bash script that performs the conversion.

Note however that updating CentOS RPMs to Rocky RPMs will likely install updates of various configuration files, which will leave various *.rpmsave and *.rpmnew files that require the administrator to examine and potentially merge local changes that were made when running CentOS.