The State of CentOS 8.0 As The Community Rebuild Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0

With Scientific Linux bowing out, CentOS 8 will be the primary community/non-commercial re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. That is, once CentOS 8.0 is ready to be released.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 was released earlier this week but it will be a bit of a waiting game before CentOS 8.0 is ready to ship. In response to inquiries about the state of CentOS 8.0, the developers involved have created a status Wiki page to document the rough status of their work on rebuilding and crafting RHEL 8.0 as CentOS 8.0.

So far they have the RHEL 8.0 sources staged on CentOS Git, they have their new build system setup, and are working on the artwork. But they still need to finish up the necessary CentOS 8 artwork and going through their multiple series of build loops in order to get all of the CentOS 8.0 packages built in a compatible fashion. There will also be installer updates needed followed by a release candidate(s) and then finally shipping CentOS 8.0.

At this point there isn't any firm timeline known for when CentOS 8.0 will be ready to ship but those interested can this Wiki page for updates.

While we would certainly recommend RHEL 8.0 or CentOS 8.0, if for some reason you are stuck in the Oracle camp, Oracle Linux 8 is also coming soon as its rebuild of RHEL8 with various Oracle add-ons and their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.