Tag Archives: CentOS8

End of CentOS Linux. Where to migrate?

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End of CentOS Linux. Where to migrate? Hello everyone! As you probably know, CentOS Linux, the main Enterprise-level Linux server distribution, will soon disappear. It wasn’t hard to predict when RedHat acquired CentOS in 2014, and now it is actually happening. End of life of CentOS Linux 8 was 31.12.2021. There won’t be CentOS Linux as downstream for RedHat anymore. Only CentOS Stream, that will be upstream for RedHat, more or less a testing distro like Fedora.

Of course, it is a matter of debate whether security guys can actually decide which Linux distributions a company will use and set that as a requirement. But in any case, the security guys will definitely take part in the decision. I made a poll in my Telegram channel. 113 people voted. So, let’s take a look at the results and discuss which of the Linux distributions we can recommend to IT teams.

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CentOS 8 with IceWM Desktop Environment

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CentOS 8 with IceWM Desktop Environment. Do you need CentOS 8 with IceWM as desktop Operating System? Most likely not. Especially if you want it to work smoothly without any worries and troubles. However, if you enjoy playing with new desktop environments, you might find it fun.

CentOS 8 with IceWM desktop environment

My reasons were as follows:

  1. I wanted to use the same Linux distribution for server and desktop. Just to minimize possible surprises during the deployment.
  2. I wanted to know what is going on in the RPM-based part of Linux world. The only way to achieve this is to use such distribution every day.
  3. I was tired of problems with the Virtual Box guest additions in CentOS 7 (yes , I run it all as a virtual machine), especially after the 3.10 kernel updates. It was time to move on.
  4. I didn’t want to use Gnome 3, because it’s slow and ugly (however it’s fully functional!). And there were no other DEs in CentOS 8 repositories at that time.

So, I tried CentOS 8 with IceWM (installed it from source) and it worked. IceWM is small, very fast, ascetic, and in some ways quite intuitive. There were some problems with the clipboard (in xTerm and with VBox shared clipboard) and with language switching, but I figured it out and I think that I would probably continue to use it. Below are some notes on how I installed it and resolved the issues.

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