As I understand it, this is an incorrect representation of what Stream is. Unfortunately I rarely see this misconception corrected.
Stream is only "between" fedora and RedHat until RHEL X.0 is released.
For instance, once RHEL 9.0 development branched from fedora 34,
Stream 9 became the upstream and just ahead of all further RHEL 9.X releases, and doesn't depend on fedora anymore.
Furthermore all Stream rpms undergo the exact same RHEL testing and quality validation chain than proper RHEL packages.
As such by using Stream 9, you are arguably receiving the bug fixes that are eventually going into RHEL 9 proper, just in advance a bit.
RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.
Yeah, Red Hat is actually moving the black box of releasing-engineering out in the wide open, for anybody to replicate, and see how the sausage is made.
CentOS Stream would be a perfectly suitable alternative to RHEL9, and in many ways more desirable. And, in a strange way all those people who were being super conservative... more attracted to centos being behind RHEL, as if that made CentOS more stable by being slightly behind... well, that's RHEL now. So.. uh.. maybe just use RHEL instead, since it's now even more conservative? Also, it's important to recognize during all the drama, Red Hat changed their licensing to be pretty much free for small to medium sized operations. So the argument of being cheap, or whatever free value of CentOS is now entirely gone... Red Hat only cares to license from the medium to large.
> RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.
Wow, what a remarkable offering; they give free users even better service than their paying customers! It's so benevolent of them to give such amazing service away and definitely not use this totally-better product as a beta to ship updates before it gets to the stable users.
/s
Edit: Seriously, though; if a company has 2 almost-identical products and claims that the free product is equal or better than the free product, they're either lying to the free users or defrauding the paying users.
The people who pay for RHEL want the stability. So a faster-updating OS is technically superior but requires more regular testing & development work from the customer side.
The people using CentOS also wanted the stability. And if RH had added Stream as an option, that would have been totally reasonable and a great move. It was the way they killed the stable version while proclaiming that Stream was totally a good replacement that was disingenuous, because it was not a replacement for "as stable as RHEL without cost".
One thing that hasn't been clear to me about CentOS Stream is if it is possible to determine that the repos at this instant are identical to a given RHEL minor release (and possibly stay there temporarily). For example, if I have a non-production system running CentOS Stream 8 so I can test out changes to RHEL earlier, can I be confident that testing on a certain date will be applicable to the next RHEL release when it comes out, or do I still need to test on RHEL separately when it is released?
My understanding is the the stream repo sorta rolls forward but leaves behind a trail of X.Y.Z checkpoint repos representing major.minor.batch-number, so that would be like rhel-9.1.0 for the zero-day batch of updates on rhel-9.1
Stream is only "between" fedora and RedHat until RHEL X.0 is released.
For instance, once RHEL 9.0 development branched from fedora 34, Stream 9 became the upstream and just ahead of all further RHEL 9.X releases, and doesn't depend on fedora anymore.
Furthermore all Stream rpms undergo the exact same RHEL testing and quality validation chain than proper RHEL packages.
As such by using Stream 9, you are arguably receiving the bug fixes that are eventually going into RHEL 9 proper, just in advance a bit.
RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.