The Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda installer for carrying out new operating system installs is in the early stages of a major rewrite to its user-interface and moving forward will be web-based.

While many were upset by CentOS Linux 8 going premature EOL at the end of last year, for those that made the move to CentOS Stream there continues to be a love of moment in part by the recently establisher Hyperscale SIG. For CentOS Stream 9, the big hyperscalers have been working on some interesting additions/backporting to the platform.

While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched.

While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9.

Following last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, CentOS Linux 8 version 2111 has been released as its RHEL 8.5 rebuild. This comes ahead of CentOS 8 becoming end-of-life at year's end.

Red Hat today announced the first public beta of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0.

Red Hat already employs numerous open-source graphics driver developers from DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie to numerous others on his team working on areas from Mesa OpenCL support to Heterogeneous Memory Management to other user and kernel-space improvements for open-source Linux graphics. Red Hat has now put out a call to hire yet another experienced Linux GPU driver developer.

Created this year has been the CentOS Kmods special interest group for dealing with deprecated device support and out-of-tree modules. This Kmods SIG has begun crafting their initial set of extra kernel modules for use on CentOS.

One of the areas where Linux has struggled on the desktop has been around HDR (high dynamic range) display support while that will hopefully be addressed in the coming months with Red Hat hiring an engineer to focus on that problem.

Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper.

The newest special interest group (SIG) approved by the CentOS Board of Directors is around the automotive space for in-vehicle automotive use-cases.

The CentOS Board of Directors has approved the formation of the CentOS Kmods special interest group for expanding the selection of kernel modules available to this distribution.

More build artifacts of CentOS Stream 9 are being published now while more OS images are still on the way. CentOS Stream 9 is open for contributions as RHEL's future upstream.

One of the exciting initiatives taking place recently within the CentOS camp has been the CentOS Hyperscale special interest group that is backed by engineers from Twitter and Facebook along with other organizations. They've been making more progress on offering their hyperscaler-focused packages/updates and even onto publishing a CentOS Hyperscale Workstation operating system image for testing.

Stemming from last month's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 release and then the RHEL 8.4 based updates to Alma Linux, Oracle Linux, and CentOS 8, RockyLinux has today reached general availability on its v8.4 release.

Being proposed within the CentOS project is a new special interest group for providing kernel modules not otherwise available within CentOS Stream. This would also include changes around where CentOS / Red Hat disable some kernel modules or artificially limit the scope of supported hardware.

While CentOS Linux 8 is being discontinued at the end of the year in favor of Red Hat focusing those resources on CentOS Stream, CentOS Linux 8 2105 was released today as the newest version that is now based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 sources.

With CentOS Stream to be the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux moving forward, a CentOS special interest group is being formed that is driven by Red Hat stakeholders in helping to ensure technically interesting CentOS Stream changes made by community members are evaluated and primed for inclusion into future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 has reached general availability (GA) status as the latest iteration of RHEL8.

Red Hat is already one of the leading employers of open-source graphics driver developers and other engineers working on the upstream Linux desktop graphics stack while they are adding even more.

Not only does Red Hat continue investing heavily in GCC and the GNU toolchain but it turns out they are ramping up their LLVM compiler talent as well.

While Fedora Workstation has been moving along with its Btrfs file-system usage and beginning to make greater use of its functionality, Red Hat does continue investing heavily in Stratis-Storage as their path forward for next-generation Linux storage with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Today marks the release of Stratis 2.4.

Red Hat is ending out the quarter by issuing their first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4.

Red Hat is in the process of building out an "infotainment" team to work on low-level Linux infrastructure work around their growing automotive efforts.

Last month Red Hat announced no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux for small production environments while now they have extended their gratis RHEL offering to also include "open-source infrastructure" being entitled to no-cost usage.

The CentOS Hyperscale effort is sounding quite promising for those riding CentOS Stream and wanting fresher packages in some instances and alternative defaults as a blend of CentOS Stream, Fedora / EPEL, and its own forthcoming package repositories.

If Red Hat's new no-cost offering for up to 16 production systems for RHEL doesn't fit your requirements and are evaluating alternatives to CentOS 8 that will be EOL'ed this year, Rocky Linux remains one of the leading contenders and is on track for its inaugural release in Q2 of this year.

Following the announcement at the end of last year that CentOS 8 will be ending and instead focusing on CentOS Stream as the future upstream to RHEL, there have been many concerned by the absence of CentOS 8 past this year. In trying to fill that void, Red Hat announced today they will be making Red Hat Enterprise Linux free for small production deployments.

The CentOS board has approved the creation of a "Hyperscale" SIG spearheaded by engineers from the likes of Facebook and Twitter in aiming to make CentOS Stream more appealing to such large scale server/cloud organizations.

As we reported almost one year ago, Red Hat was looking at likely dropping older x86_64 CPU support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 and we now have a better idea of their plans in catering RHEL9 better to modern processors.