Comment by heywoodlh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heywoodlh | Hacker News Reader

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> I fail to see what separates Alma from CentOS Stream at this point

I believe that AlmaLinux's approach is in-line with Red Hat's vision for downstream OS-es. Rocky's is not.

I think a potential benefit to aligning with Red Hat's approach is that both AlmaLinux and Red Hat will be contributing fixes, improvements, etc. to CentOS Stream -- and any other OS-es that base off of CentOS Stream. And, nothing is preventing AlmaLinux from snapshotting their own stable releases -- which allows the AlmaLinux team to test and release stable releases to their users.

> the Hostility of IBM and Redhat here has lead me to transition 100% of the CentOS Server I managed to Ubuntu

I completely agree with this perspective. This is why Rocky's decisions really baffle me: why use an upstream OS like RHEL if you absolutely do not align with its objectives? I feel like it would have made much more sense for Rocky to make Fedora their upstream instead of implementing workarounds to copy RHEL.

> I will never use RHEL or RHEL based distribution again at this point so I really do not care about the future of Alma or Rocky either

I also do not use any Fedora based distribution (typically just running NixOS or Ubuntu), however, I find that I do care about these shifts because Red Hat has tremendous impact on the trajectory of most Linux distributions. And the downstream OS-es' responses have been interesting to observe to me. :)

>I believe that AlmaLinux's approach is in-line with Red Hat's vision for downstream OS-es.

As far as I can tell this is logically incorrect CentOS/Alma are upstream not downstream and red hat's vision of downstream OSes is they don't exist because that takes a nickel out of IBM's pocket.

AlmaLinux matches releases and versions with RHEL. More clarification in this 2-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNMnajmyLaA

You're correct, I was referring to AlmaLinux's former status of being downstream of RHEL. Additionally, from Red Hat's perspective, AlmaLinux is still downstream of CentOS Stream (and thus a participant of Red Hat's vision for CentOS Stream[0]).

> red hat's vision of downstream OSes is they don't exist because that takes a nickel out of IBM's pocket

I think CentOS Stream actually contradicts this because (I would imagine) it's a lot of work to maintain and greatly benefits the community -- and Red Hat still makes it freely available for other distributions to base off of.

[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...

EDIT: clarified RH's vision for CentOS Stream and added my thoughts on CentOS Stream

Technically code-wise we're a downstream of CentOS Stream for the most part, but the end result is more of a hybrid because we're targeting RHEL and can match commits to RHEL commits from stream for a lot of it...so yeah.

Formerly we were just 100% downstream RHEL with none of this nuance, as you mentioned.

> I believe that AlmaLinux's approach is in-line with Red Hat's vision for downstream OS-es. Rocky's is not.

What is in-line with users' vision?

At this point, I'm not sure why end users who care about Red Hat stability don't just use RHEL directly. Red Hat has multiple ways to take advantage of RHEL that involve no cost (that weren't available when the original CentOS project was conceived):

- Free developer licenses[0] (great if you're a home-labber, IIRC you can get up to 16, I think?)

- Red Hat UBI images[1]

I feel like most users of AlmaLinux won't see a huge difference between just using AlmaLinux's release cycle vs RHEL -- especially since AlmaLinux will be ABI compatible with RHEL. I.E. apps that work for RHEL should work for AlmaLinux.

So, back to your original question, I don't know what end-users want more of other than as was said by mrweasel in a different comment: "that's not what some people want, they specifically want RHEL, but for free".

[0] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/02/10/how-to-activat...

[1] https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/ubi

"users" is such a large category as to be absolutely meaningless. It's kind of like saying "what do Americans think about big tech?"

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