Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 “released”

As ever: it depends and people's motivations vary. There's a bunch of people who will want to see what it's like - whether you can move cleanly to it from a previous iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example. There's some who will be relying on the regular release cadence that we've come to expect from, say Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 - twice a year in May and November - date based, fairly well.

[And there were and are a bunch who missed out on CentOS 8/Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 who may be looking to cross-grade machines or upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 to "something" before 2024]

Precisely _because_ it's announced at a major conference, that's exactly when you would expect it to actually be available for download as a stable release for the early adopters. Red Hat don't normally announce when beta releases are due so the first you know is when they turn up and then you get the major release ??? time later.

I'm fairly sure that I can't upgrade 8.6 -> 9 straightforwardly - so that's yet another futile re-install. Dear IBM - I know that the only thing that matters to you is containers and clouds these days but at least learn from Debian in ease of updating - oh, and reproducible builds would be handy too for confidence. Roll on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to actually make some progress from Red Hat 9 which is what some of us remember as the last "real" Red Hat (and before distributions started playing the version numbers game).