Red Hat might be the company making money off of Enterprise Linux, but the now discontinued Linux distribution CentOS Linux has many times more installs.
One of the biggest takeaways from the 2025 State of Open Source Report that was released on Tuesday is that more organization’s are continuing to use CentOS 7, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone than use RHEL itself. This would be noteworthy even if CentOS 7 wasn’t a Linux distro that’s been dead for more than nine months.
The report, which developer-focused software vendor Perforce puts out each year in collaboration with Open Source Initiative and the Eclipse Foundation, this year uses information taken from responses from 433 respondents from across the globe, all of whom work with open source software within their organizations.
For the third year in a row, Ubuntu came in as the most used Linux distribution, used by more than half of the respondents’ organizations. Debian came in second, used by over a third, and more than a quarter are still on CentOS, despite all versions of the distro now being past their end of life.
I say all versions are EOL, because even though CentOS Stream is still being actively developed, the survey distinguishes it — which sits upstream of RHEL — and CentOS 8 and earlier — versions that served as exact downstream copies of RHEL.
The fact that there are more installations of RHEL clones than instances of RHEL surprises hardly anyone.
“RHEL has never been the largest player in the RHEL-ecosystem since CentOS matured,” Joao Correia told me in an email exchange this morning. “It’s probably the most profitable one, but that space thrives through the many different distros that sprung up around RHEL more than from RHEL itself.”
I turned to Correia because of his position as a technical evangelist at TuxCare, which is one of the companies supplying extended support for those still-in-production instances of CentOS. He’s also involved with AlmaLinux, which was started by TuxCare’s parent company CloudLinux to fill the gap that was created when Red Hat announced in 2021 that it was killing CentOS as a downstream copy of its flagship software platform. In recent years, AlmaLinux has had to develop workarounds for developers, after Red Hat began tightening RHEL source code availability.
“It’s ironic for Redhat to make life harder for other players in this space,” Correia said.
Why Are Enterprises Still Running CentOS 7?
Even if Red Hat hadn’t ended CentOS as a bug-by-bug copy of upstream RHEL and the distro continued to be developed, there would still likely be instances of outdated and no longer supported versions running in data centers. Why? Because upgrading is not only costly, there’s also always the danger — however slight — that something could go wrong in the upgrade process.
With upgrading CentOS no longer an option, IT teams face having to lift and shift to another distribution — which is daunting, even if that other distro is AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, or one of the other clones… which kinda, but not completely, lowers the migration to upgrade status.
“It’s incredibly costly, both in actual money spent and in work hours, to change a moderately sized fleet of servers to a different distribution,” Correia said. “Both directly doing the migration and adapting your tooling to the new distribution. And some people just dislike change. They’ve worked for many years around CentOS — the ‘real’ CentOS rather than Stream — and they simply don’t want to change, no matter how similar the alternative is. ‘Change is hard’ is a truism in IT.”
He said that the findings in Perforce’s study line up with TuxCare’s own Year in Review report, which showed that new customers for its Endless Lifecycle Support for CentOS 7 peaked at around the time that the distro went EOL at the end of June — which was expected — but that the numbers continue to be “pretty significant.”
“Organizations are sticking with CentOS 7, and seem pretty content doing so,” he said. “Doing it while having some form of support effectively removes most of the risk, so it’s not like they are putting their infrastructure in jeopardy.”
The chairperson at AlmaLinux, benny Vasquez, echoed Correia’s sentiments.
“The problem is one of friction,” she said. “The cost of upgrades and migrations is high. The job of most admins is to convince their leadership that the risks involved in not keeping things current are much more costly. That friction, coupled with companies who provide extended support for CentOS (like TuxCare and Perforce), lets the more cautious or just slower-to-move companies avoid the risk and the cost of upgrading.”
Vasquez said that the companies that continue to run some of their workloads on CentOS won’t be doing so forever.
“These companies are nearly all planning their next move within five years,” she said, “as their extended support contracts come to an end and the Enterprise Linux ecosystem stabilizes.”
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
“and CentOS 8 and earlier”: do you mean “and CentOS 8 and later”?
No. CentOS 8 and earlier. CentOS 7 is the most-used Linux distros in data centers today, overall.
I (we) don’t use CentOS any more for the sole reason that I (we) moved to AlmaLinux, which is what CentOS used to be and even more.
Red Hat has a love-hate history with their derivative/upstream: when Fedora appeared as the succesor to RHL, they tried to FUD users into going to using RHEL instead of Fedora, then they wisened-up and encouraged people to Fedora. When CentOS appeared, they tried to crush it including with legal threats, then they wisened-up and embraced the project and hired some developers. Then IBM acquisition happened and CentOS was thrown under the bus… Alma and Rocky appeared and users moved there.