[quicklyfrozen]

CentOS will be useless as a replacement for RHEL. Without the guarantee of binary compatibility, any CentOS Stream update may break your locally installed applications.

And I only recall CentOS significantly trailing RHEL at the major version updates (e.g. 6 and 7). Other updates seem pretty timely, and the major version lag doesn't leave me vulnerable.

I can see this being useful for developers who are building something that needs to be compatible with the next major release of RHEL, but I'm not sure who else it will be useful for.

[Spivak]

I replied to you in another thread but nonetheless CentOS Stream isn't going to break your binary compatibility for the same reason that RHEL 7.3 doesn't break binary compatibility with RHEL 7.2. CentOS Stream is spiritually always the next minor release of RHEL.

Unless you're the kind of person who pinned to a specific minor version of CentOS (which isn't the default and not supported for very long) you can use CentOS Stream exactly the same as you currently are and it will be a strict improvement for you. Bugfixes, security updates, and new features will come to you before they're either batched for release in the next minor version of RHEL or back-ported to the current supported releases.

[macspoofing]

>bugfixes, security updates, and new features will come to you before they're either batched for release in the next minor version of RHEL or back-ported to the current supported releases.

Security fixes are not coming to CentOS Stream first. That's been in the announcement.

[quicklyfrozen]

They do specifically mention that some fixes may come to RHEL first.

I'm sure they'll try not to break binary compatibility, but as it appears to be somewhat experimental and targeted to developers, breaking updates may occur. Isn't that the point of this distro -- so such testing can take place before updates are rolled into RHEL?

So, fine for a developer workstation, but I don't see how it can be stable enough to use in production.