How CentOS Stream and RHEL 9 Led to AlmaLinux 9 (zdnet.com) 33
ZDNet writes that in late 2020 Red Hat decided "they'd no longer release CentOS Linux as a standalone distribution. Instead, CentOS Stream would work as a beta for RHEL."
So where are we now? The competition immediately sprang up to replace CentOS. The two most important of these are the AlmaLinux OS Foundation's AlmaLinux and Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation's Rocky Linux. [May 16th saw the release of Rocky Linux 8.6.] Now, mere weeks after the release of RHEL 9, AlmaLinux 9 has arrived.
Like RHEL itself, AlmaLinux 9 starts from CentOS Stream via RHEL. Indeed, AlmaLinux developers are CentOS Stream contributors. The bottom line is that CentOS 9 is an identical twin to RHEL 9 — except for the names and trademarks. It has all the same features, all the same advances, and, for better or worse, all the same bugs.
Besides the big server architectures, AlmaLinux is also ready to run on everything from cloud and Docker images to Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux and Raspberry Pi, the article points out.
And Jack Aboutboul, AlmaLinux's Community Manager, tells ZDNet "We are building AlmaLinux with the specific goal of creating an independent CentOS successor that is truly community-centric and designed for everyone... We offer everyone a uniform platform that is safe, secure, easy to use, and dependable to build your tomorrow on."
So where are we now? The competition immediately sprang up to replace CentOS. The two most important of these are the AlmaLinux OS Foundation's AlmaLinux and Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation's Rocky Linux. [May 16th saw the release of Rocky Linux 8.6.] Now, mere weeks after the release of RHEL 9, AlmaLinux 9 has arrived.
Like RHEL itself, AlmaLinux 9 starts from CentOS Stream via RHEL. Indeed, AlmaLinux developers are CentOS Stream contributors. The bottom line is that CentOS 9 is an identical twin to RHEL 9 — except for the names and trademarks. It has all the same features, all the same advances, and, for better or worse, all the same bugs.
Besides the big server architectures, AlmaLinux is also ready to run on everything from cloud and Docker images to Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux and Raspberry Pi, the article points out.
And Jack Aboutboul, AlmaLinux's Community Manager, tells ZDNet "We are building AlmaLinux with the specific goal of creating an independent CentOS successor that is truly community-centric and designed for everyone... We offer everyone a uniform platform that is safe, secure, easy to use, and dependable to build your tomorrow on."
I like to mock RMS - heck, he often deserves it (Score:5, Insightful)
But I gotta admit the GPL is largely what makes AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and the like possible - despite the best efforts of Big Blue to squash them. So thank you, Richard Stallman.
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Re:I like to mock RMS - heck, he often deserves it (Score:5, Informative)
IBM has owned Red Hat since 2019.
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That doesn't mea the GP is wrong. I was expecting Red Hat to kill off CentOS ever since they took control of it. You could tell they'd always been disappointed at their inability to lure CentOS users onto paid RHEL subscriptions. The only surprise is that it took them so long.
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Anyone who has any dealings with IBM whatsoever in the last 30 years can tell you someone at IBM did have some say in the matter because that is how IBM operates and has always operated, no matter what categorical denial you try to vocalize. They are one of the companies known world-wide for micromanagement of subsidiaries.
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I'm still not exactly clear on why CentOS had to end.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The CentOS board had been mostly hired by Red Hat before this. I'm sure that not all of the reasons are public, but more development was happening in the field with CentOS rather than RHEL, and customers would develop on CentOS and use RHEL for production. And it bumps up Red Hat's value to have licenses, even very inexpensive or free licenses, to demonstrate their presence in the world market. But various of their commercial ventures, like (not-so)FreeIPA and Ansible Tower were simply not bringing in reven
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>"I'm still not exactly clear on why CentOS had to end."
It didn't have to end. IBM was under the false assumption they could force everyone using CentOS to pay up and move to RHEL or become beta testers for it instead. But it doesn't work that way in the FOSS environment, and they should have known that already. It had the exact predictable results:
1) Development of new RHEL clones.
2) People moving to other, non-RHEL derived distros.
3) Poor reputation for IBM/RedHat.
Further, the stunt severely hurt th
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editors? (Score:2)
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What the parent was trying to say is that the ZDNet article has an error and should probably read as: "Indeed, AlmaLinux developers are CentOS Stream contributors. The bottom line is that AlmaLinux 9 is an identical twin to RHEL 9"
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Too Late for Me (Score:3)
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Same, switched to (the unfairly maligned) Ubuntu as it's basically Debian with layer of professional support, [...]
Debian with Snap apps? That's a big difference. IRC Ubuntu also runs a snapshot of Debian Unstable, which has naturally more bugs than Stable or Testing, and since it's a snapshot largely won't be updated within the release version. (I don't know if make exceptions for critical bugs.)
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I know of several companies who discarded RHEL and CentOS for any proof of concept projects. They consider CentOS discarding point releases that match RHEL point releases as destabilizing, though Red Hat has tried before to discard point release. The previous attempt was Red Hat 9 nearly 20 years ago in 2003. That did not work out well, either, clients stayed on Red Hat 7 point releases as long as possible, just as current Red Hat customers are remaining on RHEL 6 or RHEL 7 as long as they can.
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>"When Red Hat announced the CentOS future path, I abandoned everything Red Hat related and moved on to Debian. "
We were just readying a CentOS 8 major server deployment. Instead of switching and losing all that investment of time/energy, we delayed the rollout for 6 months, until a clone was released. Then ran the conversion script, and rolled it out as an AlmaLinux server instead.
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Stream is unsupportable by design (Score:5, Informative)
The reason point releases are important, and the reason (up)Stream is unsupportable, is that you need predictable and repeatable code drops to test your products against so when you tell users an OS is 'supported' your support organization stands a chance of actually making it work. With rolling releases, there's nothing to to test against. Just because it worked on stream today is no indication that you will be able to make it work again tomorrow, so rolling releases are inherently unsupportable, and that is by design.
What we need is another Linux distro (Score:5, Funny)
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Rather sad this is marked funny.
None of the hundreds of distributions that already exist are good enough? Let's make another one!
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