The end of Community Enterprise Linux Operating System (CentOS) by Red Hat.

I am one of those strong supporter of Open Source Software (OSS) since very early days, especially the operating systems, where I experience the MINIX towards Linux and BSD.

Since the beginning I love all those distributions of Linux and BSD, because one has its own beauty, which leads me to try out most of them; some of the popular ones are still around, some have their name changed and some were discontinued (https://distrowatch.com/).

Those days, it's not that easy to configure your Linux box that you need to compile your kernel for certain hardware support, even for the GUI to work via X Windows System, you need to know your CRT's Hsync and Vsync and so on.

As one of the many community contributor and user we trust everyone with open heart especially those who funds our projects, but very sad when corporate take a stake in the community project and later change the direction for their business gain, that's what happened to CentOS, fortunately Gregory Kurtzer the founder of CentOS spin-off a new distribution called Rocky Linux (https://rockylinux.org/).

Everyone has their own preference, as of for me, I like Debian. As most can find my name as one of Debian consultant (https://www.debian.org/consultants/). Perhaps you should choose yours too.

Generally Linux operating system can be divided into three elements, which are, desktop, server and devices. There are quite a number of operating systems called Live CD (can have it in USB as well), which doesn't need you to install on your desktop, such as Knoppix (https://www.knoppix.org/), instead just plug & play. Most of the server nowadays are running on Linux, because it's so easy, fast and secure to provision any service, what you need is just an internet connection to download an installer that's less than 500Mb transfer it to a USB by making it bootable, and you see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Perhaps you may have heard of OpenWRT (https://openwrt.org/), this firmware will enable your typical router to be feature rich and robust.

The million dollar question for us who are running community edition of open source project are, if I bumped into problem, who shall I call? will anyone in forum can help me on it? if it is a business critical this will jeopardize my operation! I have been hearing these statements ever since more than 20 years back. Just roll up your sleeves and start to trust yourself and the community, I am not promising that you it will be a rosy deployments, but trust me, it is very exciting and worth a journey ahead.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-shifts-from-red-hat-unbranded-to-red-hat-beta/