I am planning to move to CentOS Stream and everywhere I read about it they mention how it is "unstable" and "prone to breaking changes" etc, though they never gave specific examples. I would like to hear some real world stories about CentOS breaking changes.
These observations are greatly dependant on who is saying it: CentOS folks probably have a very different idea about stability than most Linux desktop users.
Either way, I always had the impression Streams concerns are exaggerated and mostly hear-say. There are better reasons for not using Stream, namely steering clear of Red Hat and not reinforcing their ecosystem.
If I'm allowed to muse, I never understood all these CentOS forks either. Why not put that effort into Debian, a truly democratic distro without any corp able to make these kind of moves?
What is wrong with the Red Hat ecosystem, as long as we stick to the open source part of it? Red Hat's ecosystem has got some really neat pieces of software, such as Podman, Cockpit, virt-manager, Ansible, and more.
None of those pieces are tied to the Red Hat distros, and Red Hat being involved seems to me to be the fundamental issue. They're ever altering the deal they have with their community. Why not join a community that's constituted in a way where no single commercial party can effectively control everything?
FreeIPA in CentOS Stream has a major bug causing it to corrupt ldap entries and all of the users accounts had to be recreated. I know FreeIPA is not really stable on the best of the times but this was Stream specific.
I work for Red Hat Kernel maintenance (now), previously part of product security. I imagine you wont find much "breakage" in CentOS because of how the Red Hat Engineering process works.
All patches that end up in CentOS stream (kernel) end up going through the same continuous integration testing that standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel fixes would go through. There is additional advanced testing that "RHEL kernels" go thorugh.
Each weekly 'Build' (that also ends up hitting centos stream git server) goes through the regular QE process, and the most recent qualified release at the time of a 'compose' ends up making into the Red Hat CDN.
Z stream kernel is the area that im involved in, these particular fixes that make it into Z stream are -very- low risk and are based on customer demand. The CentOS streams wont "break kabi" but I guess there could be mistakes made before it reaches the advanced RHEL testing. Choosing a more mature release would likely mitigate much of the risk.
Either way, I always had the impression Streams concerns are exaggerated and mostly hear-say. There are better reasons for not using Stream, namely steering clear of Red Hat and not reinforcing their ecosystem.
If I'm allowed to muse, I never understood all these CentOS forks either. Why not put that effort into Debian, a truly democratic distro without any corp able to make these kind of moves?