This year, I was back in Brussels. I visited two conferences: CentOS Connect and FOSDEM. As usual, both events were fantastic, with great talks and nice people. And as usual, they were also exhausting and not just for introverts like me. I stayed to Belgium to recover, but that’s another story… :-) CentOS Connect Some people still ask me why I visit Red Hat events, especially because I am a proud openSUSE desktop user, while FreeBSD feels the closest to me when it comes to software design and philosophy – not to mention that it is the OS that I have been using the longest (since 1994).

Let me share my Fedora story with you. Hopefully, it helps you to understand, why I am also promoting AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, even if I am an active Fedora and CentOS community member and contributor. Before the beginnings Someone suggested me to try Red Hat Linux in 1995 and replace Slackware Linux with it on my university server. I installed it, but I did not become a fan. And when I found the print out of the password file of my server on the wall of the Russian students’ computer lab (see: https://peter.

CentOS Stream 9 has been around for a while, but it was officially announced just a few days ago. I already tested some earlier snapshots and they had some rough edges. The current version installed without random crashes, has networking and runs smoothly. EPEL – the semi-official repository by Fedora maintainers – is already there, but practically empty, syslog-ng or it’s dependencies are not yet there. As someone asked about syslog-ng support, I had a first try at building it.