All this time I had thought that Rocky Linux was winning the fork war over Alma (in the fight to be the successor to CentOS), but this post might change that with a good chunk of the science community throwing their weight behind Alma.<p>Do we have anyone else in the audience that has any insights over whether Alma is more prevalent over Rocky or is it the other way around?<p>I know I can run Rocky Linux from DigitalOcean which I appreciate.
I’m out of the loop on RHEL forks. Can someone explain why it is important to be binary compatible with RHEL? Is there a lot of software whose binaries will only run on RHEL? Or is this more a case of wanting something free that can still make use of RHEL-specific skills and knowledge?
I would prefer to use RedHat based distros but their lack of official non free repos annoy me - I don’t want to add a community repo, I want packages maintained by trusted core engineers. Sure the community repos <i>probably</i> have that, but I last I checked I couldn’t find any assurance on the security of the community repos. SBOMs don’t mean shit if you’re installing stuff from random no-assurance locations.
Obviously stability is the most important factor for the people running nuclear experiments so they choose RHEL. Nevertheless, if I were them, I would consider trying Nix or Guix to potrntially turn the configs/builds into comparably strict math and making these reproducible.
What I didn't like about AlmaLinux so far is that it takes more effort to google solutions to problems than for Ubuntu.<p>That may sound stupid or lazy, but there it is.
And after all of that, dnf auto update still doesn't support auto restarts for kernel updates, amazing.<p>Also no in-place upgrades since for ever.
What happened to scientific Linux? It's a bit odd that it seems to be being discontinued rather than rebased on Alma? Do they no longer believe scientific Linux adds value?
I went through the Rocks Cluster cycles in 3, 4, and 5 with SLC and Scientific until those fell by the wayside.<p>Rocky is the underdog you want to win.<p>Alma is the leader except in terms of security update latency.<p>The problem is that Cent 8/9 Stream has quicker critical CVE patches because it's essentially the source and is closer to mirroring RHEL.<p>It's hard to convince corporate folks to use Alma when Cent is still the "safer" choice technologically and provides continuity even if its governance and lifecycle maybe worse.
How are these long-term support Linux distros able to provide LTS for the thousands of packages they include?<p>If a security bug is discovered in an old version of RabbitMQ do the distro maintainers learn Erlang/OTP to patch the bug?
Alma produces a rather snazzy script to migrate from CentOS which works really well.<p>I'm told it also works with Rocky, but I haven't tried it.
Not a linux expert.<p>Skimming wikipedia it seems the main selling point of both Rocky and Alma is that they're binary-compatible with red hat, right? Could some experts clarify: if you want to be binary-compatible with red hat, why not just use red had?
Absolutely love the integrated signing of containers (Sigstore technology).<p>If more distros support this, then our life would be far less stressful.<p><a href="https://www.sigstore.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sigstore.dev/</a>
I bet these guys have a lot of unusual legacy requirements, like wanting Motif and remote X11/Xdm to keep working, which takes Ubuntu out of the competition.