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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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I have mixed feelings about this, but before I pass any kind of judgement, I want to see what directions this goes in. I happen to really like AlmaLinux. I run it as the OS on my proxy server and it has been very reliable. I am more critical of this misguided marketing notion of "Enterprise Linux." It has everyone in fear, most notably the PHB, of running Linux. If you have the in-house tools and expertise to run Linux, the whole "Enterprise Linux" FUD should not apply.
What the idiots in charge want is somebody to yell at if things don't work and to throw their weight around. What they don't know is that there is enough legalese in the terms of use to basically render Red Hat and IBM blameless. You know how difficult it is to sue a software company? It's very hard.
My last job we had RHEL on most of our linux boxes (it was a predominantly Windows shop). In the 8 years I was there I made use of the RHEL support we had once, about a kernel issue, that I never got any resolution or workarounds for.
At the time I pushed to phase them out for CentOS boxes to save costs but mostly wasn't listened to.
I am not surprised in the least. Support contracts sold on fear, uncertainty, and doubt are money makers.
Mostly you're paying so that never getting any resolution is someone else's fault.
Yeah, I'd like to see where they want to go with it too. Looks like the primary motivation is "we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle".
I'm running Alma at home right now, and I'll probably continue to, if it's RHEL-like but a little faster paced on updates. Rocky still maintains bug compatibility, so it's still an option if you want that.
I'm curious to see if oracle, amazon, or suse will try to absorb some of the RHEL derivatives like alma and rocky. Right now there seems to be a lot of fragmentation in RHEL derivatives. Not to say they are trying to compete with Red Hat, but Amazon and Oracle seem like they would try to do so this way.
Doesn't Amazon just use RHEL as base for their image already?
I was under the impression that like Oracle, they used RHEL sources as their base (from git.centos.org). But it appears that they now (as of 2022) only use fedora sources and maintain other sources on top of fedora, so they've deviated from RHEL compatibility as far as I can tell.
I thought amazon linux was loosely based on fedora
Without the 1:1 compatibility, it makes me wonder if there's much use case for this over CentOS Stream.
Without the 1:1 compatibility, it makes me wonder if there’s much use case for this over CentOS Stream while it lasts.
Fixed that for you. IBM Hat is just bidding its time, doing damage control, waiting for their shills to become louder than their haters, then CentOS Stream will die.
I fail to see the use case for Centos stream full stop. I wouldn't want a rolling distro in an enterprise environment and I wouldn't want a an enterprise distro outside of a server setting. Sure you can run it on a home or personal server, you could also run Debian Sid, Arch, Gentoo, etc.
It's not a rolling distro in the same sense of Arch etc., it has major versions the same as RHEL, the "rolling" part is only pertaining to what will appear in the next minor version of RHEL. So it can still be regarded and used as a feature-stable LTS distro, very similar to RHEL itself.
The rolling part is that there is a nightly build released and no established 'stable' version. FTFY
Pretty disingenuous to say that it's ok because there's major versions when both RHEL and Centos (historic) had fairly significant changes on minor versions and a major release might last 3-5 years before a newer version became/becomes available.
But you're comparing it to Debian Sid and Arch. Packages in Stream are mature, tested and ready to go in to RHEL, and updates are very conservative. Can you honestly not tell the difference between that and Arch?
I hope they can adopt XFCE or KDE as their default DE. I feel like it would fit better in enterprise setting.
maybe your experience is different from mine, I've only seen headless RHEL servers... never saw anyone using it as a desktop distro
Some people would set up servers with a DE, and use it to manage them.
In one of my past projects, I was working with a financial company and they'd use one of those VMWare with web inferface. We set up a Debian system; and because they didn't know any better, have the default GNOME installed.
I remeber hating it so much, especially that they're slow due to resource constraint. We were allocating 4 GB of RAM, which was all we could get due to being in early phase. You'd think 4 GB is enough for a server, but not when it's running GNOME!
If it were up to me, I'd go headless. However, not everyone is into that, I guess. In hindsight, I'd probably install XFCE instead. KDE would be taking quite a bit of disk space, but it'd run surprisingly light.
Is it that difficult to get the RHEL source code now? I'm sure some people developing Alma have access to RHEL. I mean, sure, they cancel your subscription if you redistribute it, but how do they know if you do? Even if they put things in the source code to identify who got it, I'm sure they can find a way to get past that.
Trick is with these are those who need compatible products so they can match Red Hat systems run somewhere else. Test servers and so forth at colleges and the students who need to run tests back in their rooms but aren't going to drop for RHEL.
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