CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream (The Freshmaker)

Yeah, okay, we've had a lot to say about Red Hat derivatives lately. On the heels of CentOS 7's latest service release now comes CentOS 8 in a new minty flavour CentOS Stream, "a midstream distribution that provides a cleared-path for participation in creating the next version of RHEL," rebranding the "classic" CentOS build from RHEL as CentOS Linux. Mentally translating, the intention appears to be as a staging area for updates from Fedora mainline to trickle into minor releases of RHEL (and thence to mainline CentOS), using CentOS Stream to more gradually introduce updates and incorporate user feedback in a rolling release fashion rather than the typical all-at-once version churn that previously resulted. You know, like chewy candy mints that make things fresher the moment you pop one in your mouth.

That said, mainline Fedora is plenty stable for (my) daily use on POWER9 and elsewhere (we're not talking bleeding-edge saddle sore Rawhide, kids), and Fedora will still be the ultimate upstream, so while I think this will help CentOS developers dogfood changes more gradually I'm having difficulty envisioning the small slice of conservative-but-not-that-conservative users this will appeal to as a daily driver. More likely people will simply regard it as the "public beta" channel for CentOS and RHEL, and I think that will be the actual role it serves regardless of the frilly language.

The CentOS Download site is not currently showing Power ISA (or other AltArch) builds for either CentOS 8 or CentOS Stream yet, but I expect these to emerge soon. It will be interesting to see if big-endian ppc64 is still supported when they do, but there should be POWER9 and "generic" little-endian builds at minimum.