[Sn1F3rt]

Aha .... good news to note that CentOS 7 has still life left on it until 2024.  I'm on CentOS 7.  When I tried CentOS 8, I found there were a few applications I had that didn't want to work with CentOS 8.  The first one was installation of python for running the speedtest script.  Then from one pre condition that was needed to another, there continued to be issues to contend with.  So I'm sticking with CentOS 7 for now.  Hopefully by the time I have to change, there will be something better around.  Maybe Rocky Linux! Wonder whether there will be a huge learning curve involved and whether it will be an easy migration from CentOS 7?  Maybe @fChk will know?

Well in simple terms till date CentOS used to be the "downstream" build of RHEL. What does that mean? When a new RHEL release was out, CentOS developers would rebase to the changes, apply the patches etc. and create a new release. This is also the reason why CentOS releases would come after the parent RHEL releases. 

However, now CentOS is being changed to the "upstream" build of RHEL. This means that CentOS will be used as a "development" branch by RHEL testing their changes and patches on it before it goes into a RHEL release. So now CentOS releases will come first and then RHEL, which *might* lead to instability as untested changes will be included in RHEL. 

I've read about Rocky Linux, it's release is planned soon too. Well it's essentially gonna do what CentOS used to, prior to December 2020, and become the downstream build of RHEL. So it'll mostly be similar besides their own flavor which we are yet to discover.
 

Wait a minute!  Looks like CentOS 8 support has been cut down from 2029 to December 2021.  So CentOS 7 is going to be supported past CentOS 8 to 2024. Interesting. All the reason to use CentOS 7 in preference to CentOS 8.

CentOS 8 lifetime was cut short in favor of CentOS 8 but they have agreed to support CentOS 7 till the EOL of RHEL 7, due to the enormous usage.

Further read: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-i...os-stream/