Centos 8 will end at 2021. What to do now ?

You weren't the only one taken aback by the CentOS 8 announcement. How we're going to handle the changes is still being discussed.

I know we've had requests for some of these distributions in the past. With the recent news regarding CentOS 8, we'll be looking at what distributions we'll be supporting. Until that's sorted out, I've added your request here to our internal feature tracker for future considerations. If you have any other ideas or feedback, please let us know either here on our Community Questions site, or you can email us at feedback@linode.com. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts here.

Seems from various discussions online, that there's possibly 3 contenders

1. Oracle Linux 8
2. Cloud Linux 8 announced to be available in Q1 2021 https://blog.cloudlinux.com/announcing-open-sourced-community-driven-rhel-fork-by-cloudlinux
3. Rocky Linux from former founder of CentOS https://rockylinux.org/

Scientic Linux died last year AFAIK

Another possibility is Springdale Linux - http://springdale.math.ias.edu/

See their user group for a discussion of using it as an alternative to CentOS - https://groups.google.com/g/springdale-users/c/Wv1Y23Ky1-I

https://almalinux.org/ is another promising replacement.

I am curious now that AlmaLinux is out and will be a free alternative to RHEL 8, will Linode be offering AlmaLinux based images to install from?

We appreciate all the suggestions! We haven't yet determined which CentOS alternatives we'll provide, but you do have the option to install your distro of choice as a custom distribution.

AlmaLinux is indeed out and it also looks like a lot of people (cPanel including) are on board with it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmjQInMOQbM&ab_channel=AlmaLinux

They also already support it in full in version 94, so it might be the way to go here - https://blog.cpanel.com/almalinux-and-full-cpanel-support/

Install CentOS 8 on a new Linode, then run the AlmaLinux conversion script. Bingo, AlmaLinux running on your linode.

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy/master/almalinux-deploy.sh
$ sudo bash almalinux-deploy.sh

Hey @willcp00 @skytoaster and all - Wanted to let you know Linode now supports AlmaLinux! You can find it in our list of available distributions, and in the Choose a Distribution drop-down in Cloud Manager when you create a Linode.