What are the Differences Between CentOS 7 & 8

With any new software release, it is widespread to be interested in what the new version offers over the old ones. This can be doubly true for something as significant as a new major release of an operating system.

As such, with the recent release of CentOS 8, the latest version of the RHEL based operating system, you may be wondering what it brings to the table over its previous version.

This article will be covering some of the major differences between CentOS 7 and 8, which we hope will help you decide whether or not to upgrade.

Package Manager

While yum is still available as a package manager, you can keep using it as you have before. It has received a significant upgrade on the back-end, going from version 3 in CentOS 7 to version 4 in CentOS 8.

This new version of yum is based on the DNF (Dandified Yum) package manager. A major new feature is additional support for modular content and adding the ability for plugins to extend the functionality of DNF/yum.

Software

The biggest and most noticeable changes that come with CentOS 8 are that the default versions of the software available, either bundled with the OS or available in the default repositories, have been updated to later versions. Below are a comparison between CentOS 7 and 8 for some required and some of the most common software.

CentOS 7 CentOS 8 Kernel3.104.18Apache2.42.4PHP5.47.2MySQLMariaDB 5.5MySQL 8.0
MariaDB 10.3Python2.7.53.6.8Ruby2.0.02.5.5Perl5.16.35.26.3

Security

In addition to just having more up-to-date software available by default, CentOS 8 also provides some changes and additional support for various security-related software, tools, and protocols.

CentOS 7CentOS 8Supported OpenSSL Versions1.0.11.1.1Supported TLS Versions1.01.3 and 1.0Firewall Frameworkiptablesnftables

GUI

If you choose to manually install CentOS as a desktop setup or choose to install a display manager, later on manually, CentOS 8 has updated the default GNOME display manager available from the X.Org server to Waylad.

Wayland can provide some significant performance improvements over X.Org and provide some additional functionality/support on the back-end.