AlmaLinux 9 Running Well, Performance On Par With RHEL 9.0

[jacob]

Not really a plus. The CentOS logo was awful as well.

Maybe. But it makes Alma recognisable as a successor, from that point of view it's good.

Yikes... you might want to go read up on that before commenting.

I know I know I know. BUT: the new user who hasn't been following the Linux communities (plural!) in detail doesn't know that. To him or her, it either means harsh, difficult, risky etc..., not something you want to convey for an enterprise oriented OS. Or it can be seen as a teenage fan reference to Sylvester Stallone. Is this some competitor to Rebecca Black Linux?

[Terr-E]

I really hope someone more knowledgeable than me will someday do a head-to-head comparison between RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux and Springdale Linux. I've only ever seen partial comparisons between some of these 5 distros.

[cjcox]

For us (and why we chose AlmaLinux).... they were "there", they actually provided tools, they seemed to care more. Rocky was still "not there" at the time.

The AlmaLinux folks seem to have their act together.

With that said Red Hat couldn't have covered themselves with stinkier stink stuff.... (somebody high up needs to be let go). All Red Hat (IBM) has done is say, "hey, we're not irrelevant. We're VERY irrelevant!" I imagine eventually, we'll be off anything derived from Red Hat. In fact, many of my friends are wondering why we stuck it out with them for this long. I guess we'll see.

[edwaleni]

I have run both Alma and Rocky. Somehow I was drawn to Alma due to some of the configuration options. Rocky Balboa Linux seems to have more visible system checks. Neither are my daily driver, but I dropped Rocky Balboa for Alma in my Proxmox VM cluster. Yo Alma!

[jacob]

For us (and why we chose AlmaLinux).... they were "there", they actually provided tools, they seemed to care more. Rocky was still "not there" at the time.

The AlmaLinux folks seem to have their act together.

With that said Red Hat couldn't have covered themselves with stinkier stink stuff.... (somebody high up needs to be let go). All Red Hat (IBM) has done is say, "hey, we're not irrelevant. We're VERY irrelevant!" I imagine eventually, we'll be off anything derived from Red Hat. In fact, many of my friends are wondering why we stuck it out with them for this long. I guess we'll see.

I agree about AlmaLinux, it was there, it was available, it worked. It was a problem solved.

But I disagree about RedHat. For big enterprise users, the support (that includes hardware certification, operator training and certification, etc) and yes, the brand, are worth every penny. Don't forget that those users couldn't give a damn about the OS. They don't use OSes, they use applications. If SAP, Oracle or whatever they rely on runs on RHEL, they will pay for RHEL. If those apps ran on MS-DOS, they would buy MS-DOS.

[grung]

I have run both Alma and Rocky. Somehow I was drawn to Alma due to some of the configuration options. Rocky Balboa Linux seems to have more visible system checks. Neither are my daily driver, but I dropped Rocky Balboa for Alma in my Proxmox VM cluster. Yo Alma!

When I see Alma name then immediately I think about game called F.E.A.R. and I'm not sure if it is good... Game was great but it's name is not best for server OS

[abufrejoval]

Are there any advantages of using AlmaLinux over Rocky Linux?

I find it much easier to type than rocky. It also comes first alphabetically. "Soul" is more appealing as a name, while "rocky" for me has few positive conotations (if I had known the guy, that might be different).

Seriously, I've run through quite a few CentOS alternatives, including Oracle, VzLinux, looked for the one announced by SuSE and simply found Alma and Rocky to do better than all others so far: I hope they'll catch up.

Currently I am sticking with Alma, mostly for all the silly reasons I cited first, but I forgot to add that I find the artwork of Alma also more appealing.

I wish both and the runner-ups to prosper, with balanced shares of user populations. Because we need to make sure IBM won't do another grab to eliminate a community enterprise distribution of Linux.

Nor any of the other corporate or national players who like to weaponize open source software.

[abufrejoval]

I was positively surprised, how well it installed and worked out of the box. Especially with a Plasma desktop, which was a bit of a pain with RHEL/CentOS8 at first.

I switch between systems and OSs dozens of times a day, but none of them include partially eaten rotten fruit. So the ability to recycle basic interactive and motor skills is quite important.

Loss of VDO cli-tools was a nasty surprise, I haven't yet tried the migration scripts, but that's RedHat with its wonderfuly way of keeping its aquisitions <sarcasm>alive and well</sarcasm>.

I am a bit worried, that some really significant hardware innovations like CET and E/P core support aren't in RHEL9, even if they'll be critical for enterprise edge deployments very soon. I don't see how RedHat will adapt to a hybrid mode, which allows their integration without breaking the "Enterprise Oath".

Stream surly doesn't do that, it only breaks the Enterprise Quality.

[abufrejoval]

I really hope someone more knowledgeable than me will someday do a head-to-head comparison between RHEL, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux and Springdale Linux. I've only ever seen partial comparisons between some of these 5 distros.

This is a special case.

The "spirit of CentOS" is all about being a functional RHEL clone. So none of these new clones should have any significant characteristics.

Any "feature" would be a failure, any "improvement" a mistake.

So look behind the scenes, the people and sponsors involved, as really the most meaningful criteria to make a choice.

And then the only technical aspects left are scope and speed of delivery, e.g. if extra repos e.g. for the "Virtualization SIG" are included or missing.

And then in fact, whatever your choice, it shouldn't be final. One of the crucial abilities of these "sister distros" is that you must be able to go with a different sister at any time.

I did those tests for the base-OS on EL8 inside VMs and it worked just as expected.

Switching oVirt 4.4 clusters was less seamless, but that's mostly because Oracle broke oVirt so badly it doesn't even work with RHEL any more and RHV is discontinued.

[cooperate]

People are seriously arguing about linux distros' names and logos...