CentOS Stream 9 - anyone trying this?

I find CentOS Stream to be a very exciting innovation and tried it (albeit in a very limited way) on a VM soon after it was released. Currently I am trying CentOS Stream 9 in a VM too, just out of fascination that it is now upstream to RHEL and something like a rolling beta of the next release.

I’d be interested to hear from other community members experimenting with CentOS Stream 9, such as what it’s being used for and how you’re finding the experience.

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As mentioned elsewhere on these forums, I’ve been keeping an eye on security updates, noticing with some concern that CentOS Stream 9 still hasn’t patched known vulnerabilities in its default browser, Firefox ESR, about a week after they were released. Even though I’m understanding the innovation and the advantage of CentOS Stream, it does look as if this isn’t really a suitable option for Enterprise use, unless the enterprise consists of developers fairly heavily invested in contributing to CentOS Stream, or if having a rolling-beta seems useful to the organisation for some reason. Am I missing something?

Update 18 Feb 22
I hadn’t checked for updates to CentOS Stream 9 for a few days, today it did about 450MB of updates all in one go, including, finally, Firefox. Very impressive in terms of number of updates, though some lag for security purposes, it seems. If the main users are supposed to be developers, I guess that makes sense, though if I were running an enterprise dependent on a Community Enterprise Linux, I think one of the community rebuilds of RHEL would probably be what I go for rather than Centos Stream.

I have very limited resources, so because I need to use KDE Neon as a developer distro, for the time being I’m more focused on that than CentOS Stream (which I no-longer have installed), but would still like to hear your experiences if you’re using it :slight_smile:

Would you say that security lag is normal for distros and we’re all just spoiled by Debian now? lol You’d know one way or the other.

I’m running Streams on a basic server w/ auto-updates at the moment and it’s been steady so far. I may expand how much I use it depending on how things go.

AlmaLinux feels like a good fallback option but even CentOS Streams has some pretty old software versions so i’d prefer to use Streams if I can.

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I have a feeling that on development style systems like CentOS Stream and KDE Neon unstable the real drive is in pushing code forward. Perhaps they know that hackers are less likely to target machines that aren’t likely to be used for financial transactions or business transactions as much as for coding, and so they’re a little less concerned about security patches as immediately as business in the financial sector might be, or privacy conscious home users may be?

Definitely it seemed to me that the CentOS, approximately weekly very large update, included security updates but didn’t push them forward in any rush. I’m only just starting to learn more about git and how projects merge new changes and make them available on repos.

I’m still fascinated by CentOS but looking at bug triaging for KDE means Neon is where I am for the minute - and enjoying it so far. I’m one of those oddballs who reads manuals, so at the moment it’s Bugzilla!

Edit:
Also I find with RHEL they do seem very conservative in software versions, possibly even more-so than Debian, given they have an even longer support cycle than Debian, as far as I know. That’s why when I tried the (pre-stream) CentOS, I did find it pretty unexciting as far as updates go, though it’s possible businesses who aren’t technology focused but just using the technology to keep their systems up, might usually prefer this.

I am glad to know you’re using CentOS Streams and will continue to look back here for interesting news with thanks :slight_smile:

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