I'm a new student to Linux and I followed a tutorial on how to install the CentOS 7 distro in Virtualbox. When I went to download the iso I realized there was a newer one then from the tutorial. I still installed it but was left wondering If it would be best to just install the latest version. Thanks for the thoughts in advance!
That is completely up to you. CentOS 7 won't see any more mentionable features and will get from now on only security updates until 2024. CentOS 8 is more recent and so it has more "newer" technology/services/packages and it is supported until 2029. A direct in-place upgrade from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 is unofficially possible and officially it is not possible. I would at least not recommend such a measure on productive servers. If you want to try out CentOS 8 then I would recommend to install it in a new VM instance.
Thank you for the information. I wasn't aware that direct upgrade isn't a thing for CentOS or how long would each version be supported. I was concidering doing a separate VM install to test the difference between them. I'm currently exploring several distros experimenting and identifying the difference between then. Which distro you like best and why? Thank you.
I haven't try Debian yet only CentOS, ubuntu, and fedora most recently. Debian and kali is next in my list. Thank you
Funnily enough the more up-to-date desktop counterpart of CentOS, Fedora, supports in-place upgrades and they are working most of the time without any major problems. But if you run into dependencies issues in the upgrade process, things can get pretty nasty. That's probably why RHEL says in-place upgrade is not possible, or at least not recommended. No business wants a long downtime on a production server because the upgrade to a newer version went the wrong way... I've started with Ubuntu 6.06 on my desktop back in 2006 and used Ubuntu until 2011'ish. That's when I'd the switch to Fedora as my main desktop distribution and I don't miss anything. It suits my needs and the software collection is "kinda" bleeding-edge and not outdated like on some LTS distributions. On server side I'm using on all servers CentOS. It's rock-stable and has longterm support (10years support for free) and if I need longer support I can convert CentOS to RHEL where I can get on top of the 10 years like up to 3 years more support for a fee, if necessary. The community/3rd party repositories like EPEL, Remi or rpmfusion are very well maintained and Remi Repo is supporting his PHP packages with security patches even after the PHP version reached end of life for a certain time - mostly between 6-12 months longer. Software which is not provided by these repositories or not in the way I need them like Nginx or Apache with TLS 1.3 support for CentOS 7 I build myself as packages, instead of compiling and installing them directly from source. So yes, as you can see I'm a big fan of CentOS/Fedora/RedHat. If you want to learn how operating systems (in particularly Linux) generally work and how the software components work,interact with or depend on each other I would suggest to take a look at Linux from Scratch (LFS) or Gentoo but also try out the other distributions like Ubuntu, Debian etc. Everyone has his/her own preferences...
Thank you so much for your detailed response. You all have given me the information I needed plus more. I will continue to experiment with the different distros.
In case of CROM: He was just trying it out in a VM since he is new to Linux... And for a CentOS 8 successor with 10 years support I'm pretty sure that RHEL clones like Rocky Linux or Oracle (eventhough I dont like Oracle much) will provide migration paths to their clones.
