AlmaLinux Forms An HPC & AI SIG

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AlmaLinux Forms An HPC & AI SIG

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation today is announcing they are establishing a special interest group (SIG) to advance interests around high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) for this RHEL-derived operating system...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-HPC-AI-SIG

[RAINFIRE]

AlmaLinux, no longer maintaining a one-to-one relationship to RHEL is now just another linux distribution. They had a good start, but blew it with their TuxCare subscription model add and dropping bug-for-bug equivalency of RHEL. Now we have IBM/Redhat against CIQ/Rocky, Oracle/Unbreakable and SUSE/SLES in OpenELA copying Redhat Enterprise Linux and competing for the corporate dollars. AlmaLinux decided to drop the equivalency and do their own thing. May they ride off into the sunset and die happily. Another fad.

[skeevy420]

AlmaLinux, no longer maintaining a one-to-one relationship to RHEL is now just another linux distribution. They had a good start, but blew it with their TuxCare subscription model add and dropping bug-for-bug equivalency of RHEL. Now we have IBM/Redhat against CIQ/Rocky, Oracle/Unbreakable and SUSE/SLES in OpenELA copying Redhat Enterprise Linux and competing for the corporate dollars. AlmaLinux decided to drop the equivalency and do their own thing. May they ride off into the sunset and die happily. Another fad.

RHEL/IBM/Oracle/SUSE -- RIOS

They all work together because their products compliment each other. RHEL and SUSE develop and sell the core OS. One has the American market, the other has the European market. IBM sells the hardware. Oracle sells the enterprise software. Because Oracle and SUSE are part of the OpenELA we can't even say it's RIOS vs OpenELA. RIOS might as well be the OpenELA.

IMHO, Oracle/Unbreakable is something for Oracle to offer Solaris customers as an upgrade to get them onto the RIOS platform and to keep their customers from looking into non-EL distributions and alternate software and hardware providers. SUSE has the same customer upgrade path with SUSE Liberty.

IBM and Oracle have links to each other on their sites. They advertise as partners and suggest each other for products to buy. You can start an IBM tech support chat on Oracle's site. IBM employees have a login portal on SUSE. RHEL/Unbreakable/SUSE is healthy, cooperative competition between business partners with Linux. With Oracle, I suppose it's easier to cooperate with Linux than to compete with Solaris.

Alma, Rocky, Liberty, Oracle, etc all being binary compatible with RIOS EL, each other, makes them some of the EL-compatible distributions that smaller businesses and developers can look into. Not everything needs paid support and free options keep people in the RIOS EL infrastructure.

TuxCare supports RHEL and Oracle Linux, too. It's practically all the RIOS operating systems, a few Ubuntu versions, Debian...It's not just an Alma thing.

[sophisticles]

Fine, I will be the one to say it this is nothing more than a way to extract even more money from their current sponsors and attract new pigeons with more money than sense.

All of these RH clones, forks, whatever you want to call them are nothing but freeloading leeches, thieves, that want to steal the work and money RH put in developing their product and profit from it without having to do any of the heavy lifting.

If anyone wanted to see the worst that the GPL leads to all they have to do look is look at these types of projects, though in all fairness to Alma, they are still not as bad as Rocky.

But I also hold the sponsors responsible also because they enable this behavior. They want to avoid paying Red Hat's licensing fees and see projects like this as a way of getting Red Hat's work without paying Red Hat's prices.

Hey, all you Alma sponsors out there that give these people millions of dollars a year, feel free to build your own Linux OS using LFS, it's really not that hard, the instructions are right on their website.

If you can't do it yourself, give me 100 grand, half up front and I will do it for you.

[MarkG]

I just happen to have a physical machine (Xeon V3, 32GB DDR4 w/ECC, 2x2 mirror+striped ZFS plus a separate boot ssd) that needs a full wipe and fresh install. Ubuntu's out (including Mint that I run on other physical machines). But Alma/Rocky, Leap (and even Tumbleweed), are all under consideration. I run VMs of all these possibilities -- all solid and all do everything I need with no real gotcha's. For this machine, security and stability are most important.

It looks like my hesitation in picking among these is "political", not "functional". This article and comments add fuel to the fire, and TBH, ATM I'm leaning toward Leap mostly to stay above the fray caused by IBM.

[dragon321]

AlmaLinux, no longer maintaining a one-to-one relationship to RHEL is now just another linux distribution. They had a good start, but blew it with their TuxCare subscription model add and dropping bug-for-bug equivalency of RHEL. Now we have IBM/Redhat against CIQ/Rocky, Oracle/Unbreakable and SUSE/SLES in OpenELA copying Redhat Enterprise Linux and competing for the corporate dollars. AlmaLinux decided to drop the equivalency and do their own thing. May they ride off into the sunset and die happily. Another fad.

Alma Linux still maintains software compatibility which is probably the most important reason why would you use RHEL compatible distro instead of sometthing different. The fact that Alma no longer pursues bug to bug compatibility is actually its advantage. Instead of following whatever Red Hat does in their distro, they can now provide features and improvements while still keeping software compatibility. And if you want to have something identical to RHEL just use RHEL.

[lateo]

AlmaLinux, no longer maintaining a one-to-one relationship to RHEL is now just another linux distribution. They had a good start, but blew it with their TuxCare subscription model add and dropping bug-for-bug equivalency of RHEL. Now we have IBM/Redhat against CIQ/Rocky, Oracle/Unbreakable and SUSE/SLES in OpenELA copying Redhat Enterprise Linux and competing for the corporate dollars. AlmaLinux decided to drop the equivalency and do their own thing. May they ride off into the sunset and die happily. Another fad.

I strongly disagree.
Alma decided to respect RedHat's will, while the others just wanted to continue selling rebranded RedHat recipe.
Still RedHat compatible, but using their own specs files, that's some work.
So, thumbs up for Alma.

[You-]

I don't use them but I have great respect for Alma.

I can see a good place for them and they have a good niche they can cater to, maybe even moreso after RHEL10 when Red Hat will no longer support x86-64-v2 (and below), along with users who dont want to pay for RHEL but want longer than 5 years of updates that Centos Stream provides.

[rene]

can't take this SIG forks seriously anymore, ...

[kpedersen]

I strongly disagree.
Alma decided to respect RedHat's will

The free licenses (GPL, MIT, BSD) that *we* develop code under don't have a "will" clause.
And as such, Red Hat using our code, has no "will" either. Dictated by the licenses we originally chose.

Yes, the industry is daft for "standardizing" an EL as RHEL. Ultimately this is the outcome of that.