EPEL Statistics Show Recent Surge In Rocky Linux Usage Past AlmaLinux, CentOS Stream

[slalomsk8er]

It doesn't matter if one dies tbh because it's very easy to switch with any RHEL rebuild as apart from metadata and branding, they should be 100% identical.

Well in theory yes, but in practice it's still unproductive maintenance work, if you bet on the wrong horse and your security fixes could be delayed...

[edwaleni]

What happened at the end of November and again in April to cause so many RHEL users to leave?

What happened in February to cause so many users to try and, for the most part, stay on RHEL alternates? Even Oracle Linux got a nice influx of new users fleeing from Red Hat, though it looks like at the end of April or start of May some of them went back to Red Hat.

Notice of renewal for annual maintenance agreement starts it in November, businesses start to look at alternatives.

[You-]

Strange that Rocky is ahead of Alma, especially as Alma is actually involved in the community and doing good work that benefits everyone.

I would guess it is because of "better" marketing by Rocky (though they were called out for it because people did not appreciate them slinging mud at eg Alma).

I would guess those following things less closely could choose Rocky "We're Great Everyone Else is Shit" Linux over Alma "Lets build this and work as a community" Linux

[Shred00]

AlmaLinux really are doing a better job IMO. They have beaten Rocky to GA with every release so far IIRC but most importantly they support major version upgrades with Elevate rather than the shitty Rocky/CentOS attitude that you rebuild all of your machines from scratch when a new major release comes out -- because of course everyone keeps all of their machines fully under configuration management (i.e. Ansible, Chef, etc.) so that they are easy to rebuild from scratch every couple of years right?

[mroche]

I recommend to run their code provided in the screenshots and include "& (epel['sys_age'] > 1)" which is commonly done by the EPEL folks to rule out potential ephemeral/short lived systems that generate a lot of noise. They do come out ahead of AlmaLinux in terms of total system hits, but are behind both RHEL and CentOS Stream to-date. I also removed epel-9 as it's pointless to add in for comparison when Rocky 9.0 isn't available yet.

Carl and Troy gave a presentation on Friday discussing the state of EPEL back on Friday at the CentOS Dojo. I'm just waiting for the recordings to be posted to the CentOS YouTube channel.

Cheers,
Mike

[yump]

Rocky has a history of underhanded marketing tactics, which might extend to manipulating stats like these. Michael, where did you get the lead for this story?

[Paradigm Shifter]

So Rocky will be the next one RedH^H^H^H... I mean, IBM will buy out?

[lannieck]

Rocky has a history of underhanded marketing tactics, which might extend to manipulating stats like these. Michael, where did you get the lead for this story?

These stats cannot be really manipulated. They're tracked at the mirror manager side managed by the Fedora Project (who manage EPEL). The post above from mroche gives some insight (pretty sure he's a red hatter) and also here will help you get to the bottom of your question: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...93#post1329593

I would guess those following things less closely could choose Rocky "We're Great Everyone Else is Shit" Linux over Alma "Lets build this and work as a community" Linux

That attitude they had at first REALLY sucked. It really started out that way; as far as I can tell these days, the only ones who keep throwing stones are Alma and Stream folks unfortunately (carl is 100% guilty, Igor is 100% guilty, and then GMK does pretty good at stoking fires which doesn't help and makes him guilty too; only silver lining is he has his own teams being 100% contradictory to what he says. I don't know if that's a hint or not to him being forced to relinquish his project leader status, but if it is, good on them, they need a better face for their project imo. The business propaganda and vocabulary he uses is off putting and quite frankly, annoying). Things have been positive on their end though as of late: they have a few folks from the centos side who help bridge the gap for all EL distros to congregate and talk in Libera or Matrix (#el-community, it's quiet most of the time, but there's a lot of good people from centos, rocky, and alma that are there) and they seem to have quite a few folks who are part of their testing team. I noticed the RESF now has a git, but it's not clear what its purpose is yet. I have to wonder if this is to enable more contributors.

(With that being said, Igor, Carl, GMK could do well just keeping quiet and to themselves, let their projects run and prosper the way they're supposed to. Each project has a set of very competent and strong engineers and users should be choosing what they feel is best for them. It is a shame that everything has to be a competition when it really shouldn't have been in the first place.)

I remember one AlmaLinux vs Rocky Linux comparison thread where CloudLinux support was cited as disadvantage for AlmaLinux. Because you know, CentOS had Red Hat support and Red Hat "killed it" so there is risk that CloudLinux will do the same for AlmaLinux in future. I guess fear for AlmaLinux ending like CentOS has some influence on choose between AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux.

I don't really think that there is risk of killing AlmaLinux for profit in near future. Mostly because AlmaLinux was created to be free distribution compatible with RHEL. If it won't be free then it doesn't really make any sense - why pay for RHEL compatible distro when you can pay for RHEL? Also fun fact is that AlmaLinux is owned by non profit organization compared to Rocky Linux

I can't see CloudLinux ever doing that. I can see them however using Alma as their "base" rather than the other way around (or using CentOS?). Eventually they'll get there, whatever it is they have on their roadmap.

Alma is a 501c6 and is a non-profit, RESF is a PBC (someone correct me if I'm wrong) which implies it's for-profit but I don't see the RESF selling products or selling anything for that matter. My only comment is that both sides seem to be doing fine and I don't see evidence of one being 501cX vs a PBC being bad for either or. Maybe I'm blind, but both projects are doing well imo. And I can't tell, but I'm under the impression that both sides of a mix of folks either volunteer or on some sort of salary doing work for the respective projects. I don't see anything wrong with this as the other big distributions out there have this also.

I went with Rocky for now too, I do not like distros relying fully on one company as Alma more or less does. Though, they do a better / faster job at the moment than Rocky.

I will look what the future brings.

I think Alma has reliance on CL still in some capacity, but I don't see that being the case down the road. I'm pretty sure their plan is to put some real distance between each other, but to do that, it takes time. Everything takes time.

I have noticed too that Rocky is behind Alma in releasing of 9 (so is Oracle, to be fair. I would've expected Oracle Linux 9 to be out by now and at least beaten Rocky to the punch, but guess not). They're pretty good at releasing minor releases within a few days. Which is good either way for the users of both Alma and Rocky. From what I've heard, Rocky has a new build system that is accompanying the next release and they have a very early release candidate that basically anyone can go and obtain in their chat (that is what I can glean by reading their front page; apparently it's called peridot). They have a whole testing team doing stuff with it now it seems. I might go check it out, but I don't know how much I can really provide them. I guess there's one way to find out. (I'm just a stream and fedora user, so I don't know how well it'd go).

So Rocky will be the next one RedH^H^H^H... I mean, IBM will buy out?

I know this is kind of a joke, but a random thought came to mind...there's someone from the CentOS project, I believe initials are jrd, he had mentioned how anti-CentOS (or anti-rebuild) Paul Cormier is. The moment that he succeeded the previous guy (Jim Whitehurst?) he made it VERY clear what he wanted to do to CentOS. Even so, I can't see Red Hat going through this whole CentOS to CentOS Stream cursed timeline thing again with any of the other derivatives. Joke or not, it's interesting theory crafting.

[MatthewGM]

I remember 8 December 2020. Anon accounts calling "freeloaders" in /r/centos . Well, the "freeloaders" (sic) created their distro. They are just acting consequently.

In my organisation's opinion, we prefer to save a some dollars to buy Nvidia-A30/A10 to train the future scientists of my country.

Even today it is possible to search for 'rhel freeloaders' or 'centos freeloaders' on Twitter. Sorry Alma, you never voiced an opinion on this. There is no margin for the lukewarm.

[cardich]

Alma is a Greek word meaning a leap or a jump.