A Year from CentOS’s Farewell: Changes That ‘Welcome’ a Truly Open Enterprise Linux Model.

One year has passed since June 30th marked the date that changed the enterprise Linux landscape. Since then, a lot has happened — and SUSE has been an integral part of that evolution. When Red Hat officially ended the traditional CentOS life — after controlling the free distribution’s destiny for some time — it raised questions, concerns and challenges not just among CentOS users, but across the Linux community. At that moment, open source leaders like SUSE stepped up to provide clarity and certainty. Has something positive been learned from that moment? And what has happened in that year across the broader enterprise Linux landscape?

One Year After: What happened when CentOS 7 reached end of life?

A year has passed since CentOS 7, the last CentOS that kept its promises as Community Enterprise OS (offering a RHEL clone), reached its end of life.
The unexpected shift of a well-established Linux distribution — from a community rebuild of an enterprise version to an upstream development platform — was such a fundamental change that it became irrelevant to its original goal, perceived as a betrayal by many users. Beyond the CentOS users who are still running it today, unable to switch yet and needing support to keep their projects running, this has refocused attention on who controls a Linux distribution, and how critical long-term lifecycle predictability is when we start a project or make an IT investment.

Lesson 1: Control, freedom, and the risk of “closed” open source

The first lesson is that nothing is really “free” when sole control lies in the hands of a big corporation — especially one that signals discomfort with the openness of open source. Although such companies may formally build their software as open source and market it as standards-based, they often try to establish a monolithic stack for their customers and, in practice, attempt to “close” open source with “standards” that apply only to themselves — which is much more than just source.

Linux distributions delivered with real transparency and openness — that do not force users into what are, in fact, closed “single-provider” stacks, and instead provide freedom of choice, interoperability with other enterprise tools, participation in open source projects and communities, and adherence to open standards managed by neutral organizations and foundations rather than a single company — have proven to be more necessary than ever.

SUSE is committed to these principles in everything it delivers. That’s why supporting efforts like OpenELA — which helps keep the code of RHEL-compatible Linux available — is so important. Thanks to that, we can say not goodbye, but only ‘see you soon, CentOS’.

Offerings like SUSE Multi-Linux Support fill the gap by helping enterprise customers keep their Linux environments untouched, secure, and under control for many more years.

Lesson 2: The hidden risk in OS lifecycles

The second one is the OS lifecycle. Many customers relied on CentOS, thinking that version upgrades would always be there, and that a transition from one version to another would cost just a small operation.

Nobody was able to glimpse that a stable and enterprise-focused distribution would change like CentOS did from version 7 to 8 — even in the middle of the version 8 lifecycle — destroying any predictability.

OS lifecycles are critical when we start a project. Any IT investment is much bigger than the Linux infrastructure underneath — but Linux is the foundation.

How big is the risk if we need to change the OS unexpectedly? How can we ensure that an upgrade is going to keep the needed compatibility?
Enterprises need to ensure that the underlying Linux will fit their longest-term plans. It must last long enough to ensure the realization of investments in facility-bounded IT infrastructure, edge environments, and beyond.

SUSE’s answer: openness and long-term stability with SLES 15 SP7

And this is something that SUSE has taken on in a serious way. This same anniversary month, SUSE is launching SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 7 (SLES 15 SP7) — the last iteration of the first enterprise Linux that will reach a new milestone in long-term support: 19 years.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7 offers peace of mind to enterprises and security to long-term IT and projects, with a minor version that will last 12 years to safeguard investments without even a minor version upgrade.

SUSE has always followed the core principles of openness and flexible interoperability to provide true enterprise choice — and SLES 15 SP7 is no exception. It embodies these values while delivering the long-term stability enterprises need to safeguard their future.

Enterprise Linux in 12 months: milestones and shifts

In just one year, enterprise Linux has seen major changes and technical milestones. Let’s review what has happened this year technically.

At the same time that CentOS 7 ended its life, SUSE launched SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP6. It was the first enterprise Linux ready in key technologies:

• First post-quantum cryptography enterprise Linux ready
• First confidential computing-supported enterprise Linux
• First enterprise Linux shipped with kernel 6.4, providing a great advantage over other enterprise Linux stuck with years-old kernels

Another important SUSE announcement happened this year. SUSE announced SUSE Linux 16, and that SUSE Linux Micro — the first enterprise immutable Linux that allows running 100% fully supported enterprise Linux container images — will merge and power the new SUSE Linux 16 transactional mode. This will ease the adoption of immutable technology on a broader scope.

And this year we welcomed RHEL 10, which follows the same direction as SUSE. It includes transactional enterprise Linux features with technologies like bootc and image mode, ships with a 6.x kernel, and joins the club of post-quantum cryptography-ready Linux distributions.

What’s next for enterprise Linux?

What can happen in one year?

On the technical side, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP7 is a reality today — ready to last more than a decade. It provides the maturity and proven trust that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 has consolidated over the years. It combines the innovation of today with, more importantly, the stability needed to safeguard your long-term enterprise projects until 2037.

How big is that? It offers the same innovation and lifecycle timeline that a newcomer like RHEL 10 promises for its entire lifecycle — but without the risk of change, even at the minor version level. And it’s ready today, building on the maturity of all previous SLES 15 service pack validations, certifications, hardware enablement, and more.

Looking ahead, SUSE Linux 16, arriving in November 2025, will start an exciting new era. As always, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 is open source at its core, built on SUSE’s commitment to enterprise innovation — founded on long-term continuity, resiliency, compliance, security, and enterprise choice at any scale, anywhere. It will deliver new technologies, components, use cases and solutions ready to last in the enterprise. But that’s a story for the next blogs.

On the other side, some customers have learned the lesson: rely only on distributions maintained by organizations that keep openness and interoperability of open source at their core. And, in practical terms, try not to be trapped in Linux distributions with lifecycles that are neither predictable nor built to last as long as their IT projects.

CentOS and compatible environments: No goodbye, just ‘See you soon’

But what about enterprise companies with CentOS and RHEL-compatible distributions that are still running today, one year later? Was it a definitive farewell?

Of course not.

Enterprise support offerings like SUSE Multi-Linux Support will keep those environments running for years, and will give customers the choice to adopt and support new versions like RHEL 10–compatible Linux — without being tied to a single provider.

This was not a farewell — just a ‘see you soon’ and a ‘welcome again’ for truly open enterprise Linux.