Although STH uses mostly Debian/ Ubuntu, CentOS is a wildly popular distribution. CentOS is built from the Red Hat distribution source code which gives it an enormous ecosystem itself. CentOS 8 2004 is based on the RHEL 8.2 upstream distribution.
CentOS 8.2 (2004)
Since CentOS 8 2004 is built upon the RHEL 8.2 upstream if you want to find some of the big features a good place to start is the RHEL 8.2 release notes. They tend to go into better depth on features than the CentOS 8 release notes. There are some nice toolset updates such as support for gcc 9.1 and an updated python 3.8 version. With so many new processor options coming on the market, updating to new gcc toolchains is going to become an increasingly beneficial exercise for many of STH’s readers.
A quick tip for those who are installing CentOS, especially on very low-end boxes or more realistically in small VMs is this small note from the release announcement:
At least 2GB RAM are required to install and use CentOS-8 (2004). At least 4GB RAM is recommended. (Source: CentOS Wiki)
We have had enough installation processes that have run into this that we start all CentOS VMs at 4096MB / 4GB even as lower limits in ballooning devices. That helps avoid hitting the lower limits and ensures smooth operation. If you have the RAM headroom, we suggest just using 4GB and going up from there.
Final Words
This is probably not the most ground-breaking dot release out there. Still, for those who run CentOS installations, it may be worth taking advantage of the latest tools and security updates. These are only a quick yum or dnf update away.
If you want to grab the latest installation ISO, you can check out official mirrors here. Those are usually good to have on-hand in the event you have an application that needs CentOS even
 brings a new revision with updated toolsets to the ecosystem){kind=link}
How bloated is a GNU/Linux installer if it needs 2GB minimum??
@weust welcome to systemD + NetworkManager
@David which is why I run it as little as possible.
Work wise I recently installed CentOS 8 and holy crap the default cloud image is bloated. Unreal.
FreeBSD may not be perfect or what the cool kids use, but I stay away from GNU/Linux when I can.
I don’t find anything about those minimum memory requirement in the wiki or release notes?
Are they for the desktop version? Find it hard to believe it’s true for the server version!?
There is only one ISO really.