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CentOS Stream
A rolling preview of the next RHEL minor release, sitting between Fedora and RHEL in Red Hat's development pipeline rather than downstream of RHEL like classic CentOS was.
Based on
Independent (upstream of RHEL)
First released
2019
Package manager
DNF (.rpm)
Desktop environments
None (server-focused; GNOME available)
CentOS Stream replaced classic CentOS's role in 2021, but with an inverted position in the pipeline: rather than rebuilding RHEL after release (downstream), Stream tracks what will become the next RHEL minor version before it ships (upstream), receiving updates continuously ahead of each RHEL point release. That makes it genuinely useful for developers and RHEL ecosystem partners who want to test against what's coming, but it's not a like-for-like free replacement for classic CentOS in production the way Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux are. Its packages carry no fixed end-of-life the way a RHEL point release does; each Stream major version's life matches that RHEL major version's full support window.
MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.