AlmaLinux describes itself as "an open-source, community-driven project that intends to fill the gap left by the demise of the CentOS stable release." And now AlmaLinux "has announced their beta release of their CentOS/RHEL 8 fork," writes Slashdot reader juniorkindergarten.

AlmaLinux will be getting $1 million a year in development funding from CloudLinux (the company behind CloudLinux OS, a CentOS clone with over 200,000 active server instances). Their CEO stresses that AlmaLinux "is built with CloudLinux expertise but will be owned and governed by the community. We intend to deliver this forever-free Linux distribution this quarter." And they've committed to supporting it through 2029.

Their press release touts AlmaLinux as "a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8, with an effortless migration path from CentOS to AlmaLinux. Future RHEL releases will also be forked into a new AlmaLinux release."

From the AlmaLinux blog: We've collected community feedback and built our new beta release around what you would expect from an enterprise-level Linux distribution...inspired by the community and built by the engineers and talent behind CloudLinux. Visit https://almalinux.org to download the Beta images.

With the Beta release deployed, we'd like to ask the community to be involved and provide feedback. We aim to build a Linux distribution entirely from community contributions and feedback. During AlmaLinux Beta, we ask for assistance in testing, documentation, support and future direction for the operating system. Together, we can build a Linux distribution that fills the gap left by the now unsupported CentOS distribution.
On Wednesday they'll be hosting a live QA webinar with the AlmaLinux team. And there's also a small AlmaLinux forum on Reddit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Magma was developed by Facebook to help telecom operators deploy mobile networks quickly and easily. The project, which Facebook open-sourced in 2019, does this by providing a software-centric distributed mobile packet core and tools for automating network management. This containerized network function integrates with the existing back end of a mobile network and makes it easy to launch new services at the network edge. Magma operators can build and augment modern and efficient mobile networks at scale. It integrates with existing LTE and newly minted 5G networks. Several Magma community members are also collaborating in the Telecom Infra Project (TIP)'s Open Core Network project group. The plan is to define, build, test, and deploy core network products that integrate Magma with TIP Open Core disaggregated hardware and software solutions.

The Linux Foundation will help oversee this new stage in Magma's organizational future. Magma will be managed under a neutral governance framework at the Linux Foundation. Arm, Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, FreedomFi, Qualcomm, the Institute of Wireless Internet of Things at Northeastern University, the OpenAirInterface(OAI) Software Alliance, and the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF). You may ask, since Magma is already working with OIF, which is something of a Linux Foundation rival, why Magma will be working with both? Arpit Joshipura, the Linux Foundation's general manager of Networking, Edge, and IoT, explained, "Magma has gotten great community support from several ecosystem players and foundations including OIF, OAI etc. What we are announcing today is the next evolution of the project where the actual hosting of the project is being set up under the Linux Foundation with neutral governance that has been accepted by the community for a long time. OIF, OAI, and LF will work with their communities of Software Developers to contribute to Magma's core project."

"Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the now-defunct CentOS Linux distribution, has founded a new startup company called Ctrl IQ, which will serve in part as a sponsoring company for the upcoming Rocky Linux distribution," Ars Technica reports: Kurtzer co-founded CentOS Linux in 2004 with mentor Rocky McGaugh, and it operated independently for 10 years until being acquired by Red Hat in 2014. When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor.

The Rocky Linux concept got immediate, positive community reaction — but there's an awful lot of work and expense that goes into creating and maintaining a Linux distribution. The CentOS Linux project itself made that clear when it went for the Red Hat acquisition in 2014; without its own source of funding, the odds of Rocky Linux becoming a complete 1:1 replacement — serving the same massive volume of users that CentOS did — seemed dicey at best.
In a statement Ctrl IQ notes the Rocky Linux community was already "in the thousands of people driving the foundation of the organization..."

And as for Gregory Kurtzer, he was "originally basing Ctrl IQ's stack on CentOS, but he needed to pivot, as did most of the community to something else. Due to the alignment, Greg chose Rocky, and has been asked to help support it." Ars Technica adds: The company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing..."

Wading through the buzzword bingo, Ctrl IQ's real business seems to be in supplying relatively turn-key infrastructure for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, capable of running distributed across multiple sites and/or cloud providers... Not all of Ctrl IQ's offerings are theoretical. Warewulf, also founded by Kurtzer, is currently developed and maintained by the US Department of Energy. Anyone can freely download and use Warewulf, but it's not difficult to imagine value added in consulting with one of its founders...

Ctrl IQ is one of three Tier 1 sponsors identified by the Rocky Linux project, along with Amazon Web Services (which provides core build infrastructure) and Mattermost, which is providing enterprise collaboration services...

Rocky Linux is generally expected to be widely available in Q2 2021, with a first-release candidate build expected on March 31.

A major vulnerability impacting a large chunk of the Linux ecosystem has been patched today in Sudo, an app that allows admins to delegate limited root access to other users. From a report: The vulnerability, which received a CVE identifier of CVE-2021-3156, but is more commonly known as "Baron Samedit," was discovered by security auditing firm Qualys two weeks ago and was patched earlier today with the release of Sudo v1.9.5p2. In a simple explanation provided by the Sudo team today, the Baron Samedit bug can be exploited by an attacker who has gained access to a low-privileged account to gain root access, even if the account isn't listed in /etc/sudoers -- a config file that controls which users are allowed access to su or sudo commands in the first place.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Red Hat caused a lot of consternation in the enthusiast and small business Linux world when it announced the discontinuation of CentOS Linux. Long-standing tradition -- and ambiguity in Red Hat's posted terms -- led users to believe that CentOS 8 would be available until 2029, just like the RHEL 8 it was based on. Red Hat's early termination of CentOS 8 in 2021 cut eight of those 10 years away, leaving thousands of users stranded. Red Hat's December announcement of CentOS Stream -- which it initially billed as a "replacement" for CentOS Linux -- left many users confused about its role in the updated Red Hat ecosystem.

As of February 1, 2021, Red Hat will make RHEL available at no cost for small-production workloads -- with "small" defined as 16 systems or fewer. This access to no-cost production RHEL is by way of the newly expanded Red Hat Developer Subscription program, and it comes with no strings -- in Red Hat's words, "this isn't a sales program, and no sales representative will follow up." Red Hat is also expanding the availability of developer subscriptions to teams, as well as individual users. Moving forward, subscribing RHEL customers can add entire dev teams to the developer subscription program at no cost. This allows the entire team to use Red Hat Cloud Access for simplified deployment and maintenance of RHEL on well-known cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Wine 6.0 has been released today and contains over 8,300 changes, according to its full release notes. Windows Central reports: The new release of version 6.0 has thousands of changes, but Wine's website highlights some of the biggest improvements: Core modules in PE format; Vulkan backend for WineD3D; DirectShow and Media Foundation support; and Text console redesign. The full release notes for Wine 6.0 explain that the core DLLs, which include NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, and USER32 are now built in the Portable Executable (PE) format. As a result, people should see improvements for certain copy protection schemes.

The update also includes a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with the PE module. This change makes it so systems can call Unix libraries from PE when trying to perform a function that can't be handled by Win32 APIs. Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.

Legendary programmer Jamie Zawinski has worked on everything from the earliest releases of the Netscape Navigator browser to XEmacs, Mozilla, and, of course, the XScreenSaver project.

Now Slashdot reader e432776 writes: JWZ continues to track issues with screensavers on Linux (since 2004!), and discusses a new bug in cinnamon-screensaver. Long-standing topics like X11, developer interaction, and code licensing all feature. Solutions to these long-standing issues remain elusive.
Jamie titled his blog post "I told you so, 2021 edition": You will recall that in 2004 , which is now seventeen years ago, I wrote a document explaining why I made the design trade-offs that I did in XScreenSaver, and in that document I predicted this exact bug as my example of, "this is what will happen if you don't do it this way."

And they went and made that happen.

Repeatedly.

Every time this bug is re-introduced, someone pipes up and says something like, "So what, it was a bug, they've fixed it." That's really missing the point. The point is not that such a bug existed, but that such a bug was even possible. The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe .

Especially when I have given them nearly 30 years of prior art demonstrating how to do it right, and a two-decades-old document clearly explaining What Not To Do that coincidentally used this very bug as its illustrative strawman!

These bugs are a shameful embarrassment of design -- as opposed to merely bad code...
ZDNet reports that Linux Mint has issued a patch for Cinnamon that fixes the screensaver bug. But HotHardware notes that it was discovered when "one Dad let the kids play with the keyboard. This button-mashing actually crashed the machine's screensaver by sheer luck, allowing them onto the desktop, ultimately leading to the discovery of a high priority security vulnerability for the Linux Mint team."

But that's not the only thing bothering Jamie Zawinski: Just to add insult to injury, it has recently come to my attention that not only are Gnome-screensaver, Mint-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver buggy and insecure dumpster fires, but they are also in violation of my license and infringing my copyright.

XScreenSaver was released under the BSD license, one of the oldest and most permissive of the free software licenses. It turns out, the Gnome-screensaver authors copied large parts of XScreenSaver into their program, removed the BSD license and slapped a GPL license on my code instead -- and also removed my name. Rude...

Mint-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver, being forks and descendants of Gnome-screensaver, have inherited this license violation and continue to perpetuate it. Every Linux distro is shipping this copyright- and license-infringing code.

I eagerly await hearing how they're going to make this right.

Yesterday long-time tech pundit Robert Cringley reviewed the predictions he'd made at the beginning of last year. "Having done this for over 20 years, historically I'm correct abut 70 percent of the time, but this year could be a disappointment given that I'm pretty sure I didn't predict 370,000 deaths and an economy in free-fall.

"We'll just have to see whether I was vague enough to get a couple right."

Here's some of the highlights: I predicted that IBM would dump a big division and essentially remake itself as Red Hat, its Linux company. Well yes and no. IBM did announce a major restructuring, spinning-off Global Technology Services just as I predicted (score one for me) but it has all happened slowly because everything slows down during a pandemic. The resulting company won't be called Red Hat (yet), but the rest of it was correct so I'm going to claim this one, not that anybody cares about IBM anymore...

I predicted that working from home would accelerate a trend I identified as the end of IT, by which I meant the kind of business IT provided and maintained by kids from that office in the basement. By working from home, we'd all become our own IT guys and that would lead to acceleration in the transition of certain technologies, especially SD-WAN and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)... "That's the end-game if there is one — everything in the cloud with your device strictly for input and output, painting screens compressed with HTML5. It's the end of IT because your device will no longer contain anything, so it can be simply replaced via Amazon if it is damaged or lost, with the IT kid in the white shirt becoming an Uber driver (if any of those survive)."

It was a no-brainer, really, and I was correct: Internet-connected hardware sales surged, SASE took over whether you even knew it or not, and hardly any working from home was enabled by technology owned by the business, itself. It's key here that the operant term for working from home became "Zooming" — a third-party public brand built solely in the cloud.

Finally, I predicted that COVID-19 would accelerate the demise of not just traditional IT, but also IT contractors, because the more things that could be done in the cloud the less people would be required to do them. So what actually happened? Well I was right about the trend but wrong about the extent. IT consulting dropped in 2020 by about 19 percent, from $160 billion to $140 billion. That's a huge impact, but I said "kill" and 19 percent isn't even close to dead. So I was wrong.

The Linux Foundation has new courses to help you manage open-source projects and technical staff within your organization. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Previously, if you want to know how to run open-source well in your company, you had to work with OASIS Open or the TODO Group. Both are non-profit organizations supporting best open source and open standards practices. But, to work with either group, effectively, you already had to know a lot about open source. [...] This 7-module course series is designed to help executives, managers, software developers, and engineers understand the basic concepts for building effective open-source practices. It's also helpful to those in the C suite who want to set up effective open-source program management, including how to create an Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

The program builds on the accumulated wisdom of many previous training modules on open-source best practices while adding fresh and updated content to explain all of the critical elements of working effectively with open source in enterprises. The courses are designed to be self-paced, and reasonably high-level, but with enough detail to get new open-source practitioners up and running quickly. Guy Martin, OASIS Open's executive director, developed these courses. Martin knows his way around open source. He has a unique blend of over 25 years' experience both as a software engineer and open-source strategist. Marin has helped build open-source programs at Red Hat, Samsung, and Autodesk. He was also instrumental in founding the Academy Software Foundation, the Open Connectivity Foundation, and has contributed to TODO Group's best practices and learning guides. The "Open Source Management & Strategy program" costs $499 and is available to begin immediately. A certificate is awarded upon completion.

New submitter shoor writes: Seeed Studios -- the makers of the Odyssey mini-PC -- have teamed up with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux. The new BeagleV (pronounced "Beagle Five") system features a dual-core, 1GHz RISC-V CPU made by StarFive -- one of a network of RISC-V startups created by better-known RISC-V vendor SiFive. The CPU is based on two of SiFive's U74 Standard Cores -- and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it features a MMU and all the other trimmings necessary to run full-fledged modern operating systems such as Linux distributions. StarFive's VIC7100 processor design is aimed at edge AI tasks as well as general-purpose computing. In addition to the two RISC-V CPU cores, it features a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine-vision applications, a Neural Network Engine, and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator) engine.

Jake Edge, writing at LWN: The problems with "vendoring" in packages -- bundling dependencies rather than getting them from other packages -- seems to crop up frequently these days. We looked at Debian's concerns about packaging Kubernetes and its myriad of Go dependencies back in October. A more recent discussion in that distribution's community looks at another famously dependency-heavy ecosystem: JavaScript libraries from the npm repository. Even C-based ecosystems are not immune to the problem, as we saw with iproute2 and libbpf back in November; the discussion of vendoring seems likely to recur over the coming years. Many application projects, particularly those written in languages like JavaScript, PHP, and Go, tend to have a rather large pile of dependencies. These projects typically simply download specific versions of the needed dependencies at build time. This works well for fast-moving projects using collections of fast-moving libraries and frameworks, but it works rather less well for traditional Linux distributions. So distribution projects have been trying to figure out how best to incorporate these types of applications.

This time around, Raphael Hertzog raised the issue with regard to the Greenbone Security Assistant (gsa), which provides a web front-end to the OpenVAS vulnerability scanner (which is now known as Greenbone Vulnerability Management or gvm). "the version currently in Debian no longer works with the latest gvm so we have to update it to the latest upstream release... but the latest upstream release has significant changes, in particular it now relies on yarn or npm from the node ecosystem to download all the node modules that it needs (and there are many of them, and there's no way that we will package them individually). The Debian policy forbids download during the build so we can't run the upstream build system as is."

Hertzog suggested three possible solutions: collecting all of the dependencies into the Debian source package (though there would be problems creating the copyright file), moving the package to the contrib repository and adding a post-install step to download the dependencies, or removing gsa from Debian entirely. He is working on updating gsa as part of his work on Kali Linux, which is a Debian derivative that is focused on penetration testing and security auditing. Kali Linux does not have the same restrictions on downloading during builds that Debian has, so the Kali gsa package can simply use the upstream build process. He would prefer to keep gsa in Debian, "but there's only so much busy-work that I'm willing to do to achieve this goal". He wondered if it made more sense for Debian to consider relaxing its requirements. But Jonas Smedegaard offered another possible approach: analyzing what packages are needed by gsa and then either using existing Debian packages for those dependencies or creating new ones for those that are not available. Hertzog was convinced that wouldn't be done, but Smedegaard said that the JavaScript team is already working on that process for multiple projects.

Charlotte Web writes: With Linux 5.10 having shipped as the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release to be maintained for at least the next five years, a discussion has begun over dropping a number of old and obsolete CPU platform support currently found within the mainline kernel. For many of the architectures being considered for removal they haven't seen any new commits in years but as is the case once proposals are made for them to be removed there are often passionate users wanting the support to be kept.

Thelasko quotes gHacks: Linux Mint 20.1 is now available.

The first stable release of Linux Mint in 2021 is available in the three flavors Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. The new version of the Linux distribution is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Linux kernel 5.4...

- Linux Mint 20.1 comes with a unified file system that sees certain directories being merged with their counterparts in /usr, e.g. /bin merged with /usr/bin, /lib merged with /usr/lib for compatibility purposes...

- The developers have added an option to turn websites into desktop applications in the new version [using the new Web App manager]... Web apps behave like desktop programs for the most part; they start in their own window and use a custom icon, and you find them in the Alt-Tab interface when you use it. Web apps can be pinned and they are found in the application menu after they have been created.

Bleeping Computer reports: NVIDIA has released security updates to address six security vulnerabilities found in Windows and Linux GPU display drivers, as well as ten additional flaws affecting the NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU) management software. The vulnerabilities expose Windows and Linux machines to attacks leading to denial of service, escalation of privileges, data tampering, or information disclosure.

All these security bugs require local user access, which means that potential attackers will first have to gain access to vulnerable devices using an additional attack vector. Following successful exploitation of one of the vulnerabilities patched today, attackers can easily escalate privileges to gain permissions above the default ones granted by the OS.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation." ECC stands for error-correcting code. ECC memory uses additional parity bits to verify that the data read from memory is the same as the data that was written. Without this check, memory is vulnerable to occasional corruption where a bit is flipped spontaneously, for example, by background radiation. Memory can also be attacked using a technique called Rowhammer, where rapid repeated reads of the same memory locations can cause adjacent locations to change their state. ECC memory solves these problems and has been available for over 50 years yet most personal computers do not use it. Cost is a factor but what riles Torvalds is that Intel has made ECC support a feature of its Xeon range, aimed at servers and high-end workstations, and does not support it in other ranges such as the Core series.

The topic came up in a discussion about AMD's new Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5000 series processors on the Real World Tech forum site. AMD has semi-official ECC support in most of its processors. "I don't really see AMD's unofficial ECC support being a big deal," said an unwary contributor. "ECC absolutely matters," retorted Torvalds. "Intel has been detrimental to the whole industry and to users because of their bad and misguided policies wrt ECC. Seriously. And if you don't believe me, then just look at multiple generations of rowhammer, where each time Intel and memory manufacturers bleated about how it's going to be fixed next time... And yes, that was -- again -- entirely about the misguided and arse-backwards policy of 'consumers don't need ECC', which made the market for ECC memory go away."

The accusation is significant particularly at a time when security issues are high on the agenda. The suggestion is that Intel's marketing decisions have held back adoption of a technology that makes users more secure -- though rowhammer is only one of many potential attack mechanisms -- as well as making PCs more stable. "The arguments against ECC were always complete and utter garbage. Now even the memory manufacturers are starting to do ECC internally because they finally owned up to the fact that they absolutely have to," said Torvalds. Torvalds said that Xeon prices deterred usage. "I used to look at the Xeon CPU's, and I could never really make the math work. The Intel math was basically that you get twice the CPU for five times the price. So for my personal workstations, I ended up using Intel consumer CPU's." Prices, he said, dropped last year "because of Ryzen and Threadripper... but it was a 'too little, much too late' situation." By way of mitigation, he added that "apart from their ECC stance I was perfectly happy with [Intel's] consumer offerings."

Phoronix reports: It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago.

Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel...

This fresh port to the N64 was pursued in part to help port emulators and frame-buffer or console games.
And also, the announcement adds, "Most importantly, because I can."

Long-term Slashdot reader couchslug believes that "Howls of anguish from betrayed CentOS 8 users highlight the value of its long support cycles..." Earlier this month it was announced that at the end of 2021, the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 8, "will no longer be maintained," though CentOS 7 "will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024."

This leads Slashdot reader couchslug to an interesting question. "Should competitors like Ubuntu and SUSE offer truly long-term-support versions to seize that (obviously large and thus important to widespread adoption) user base?" As distros become more refined, how important are changes vs. stability for users running tens, thousands and hundreds of thousands of servers, or who just want stability and security over change for its own sake...? Why do you think distro leadership are so eager for distro life cycles? Boredom, progress or what mix of both?

What sayeth the hive mind and what distros do you use to achieve your goals?
The original submission argues that "Distro-hopping is fun but people with work to do and a fixed task set have different needs." But what do Slashdot's readers thinks? Leave your own thoughts in the comments.

And how long do you think a vendor should support a distro?

Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux. Phoronix reports: This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver. The Linux kernel already has the existing "hid-sony" driver while this PlayStation 5 game controller comes with the hid-playstation driver. In announcing the new driver, they are planning to move some of the Sony Interactive Entertainment hardware support from the existing hid-sony to hid-playstation drivers. The hid-sony driver will continue to be maintained and used by broader Sony devices. This new driver follows the move from about a year ago of Sony "officially" maintaining the hid-sony Linux input driver.

This new driver comes in at just over 1,400 lines of code in its initial form catering to the PS5 controller. When transitioning support for older hardware to this new driver there is also a promise of unit test coverage and more. The new HID-PlayStation driver is currently under review and isn't yet queued up for mainlining but those wanting to try it out can find the 13 patches up for testing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release," it lost a lot of friends. CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, immediately announced he'd create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. He wasn't the only one. CloudLinux also proclaimed it would create a new CentOS clone Lenix. And, CloudLinux will be putting over a million dollars a year behind it.

Why? Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO and founder, explained, "Red Hat's announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions. We promise to dedicate the resources required to Project Lenix that will ensure impartiality and a not-for-profit community initiative. CloudLinux already has the assets, infrastructure, and experience to carry out the mission, and we promise to be open about the process of developing Project Lenix." [...] Project Lenix will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything. The company even claims you'll be able to port entire CentOS server fleets with a single command with no reinstallation or reboots required. That's a bold claim. But CloudLinux already does that trick with its commercial Linux distribution. If the company says it can do it, I think it can. Lenix is only a placeholder name, notes ZDNet. "[A] yet to be formed governing board will decide on a permanent name for the distribution. If all goes well, the first software release will appear in the first quarter of 2021."

Well here is a surprise for those that have long used CentOS as the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux... CentOS 8 will end in 2021 and moving forward CentOS 7 will remain supported until the end of its lifecycle but CentOS Stream will be the focus as the future upstream of RHEL. From a report: For those relying on CentOS 8 to enjoy the reliability and features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 but without the licensing costs, etc, that will end in 2021. At the end of 2021, CentOS 8 will no longer be maintained but CentOS 7 will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024. The CentOS Project will be focused moving forward just on CentOS Stream as the upstream/development branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS 8 users are encouraged to begin transitioning to CentOS Stream 8. The CentOS Project announced this shift in focus today via the CentOS Blog. Red Hat's announcement meanwhile is promoting the change as beneficial to CentOS Stream.