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

[elatllat]

Alma AMI descriptions:

Official AlmaLinux OS 9.1 x86_64 image
Official AlmaLinux OS 9.0 x86_64 image
Official AlmaLinux OS 8.7 x86_64 image
Official AlmaLinux OS 8.6 x86_64 image

Rocky AMI descriptions:

Rocky-9-EC2-9.0-20220706.0.x86_64
Rocky-8-ec2-8.5-20211114.2.x86_64
null
[Copied ami-077c5602b64cb2c66 from us-east-2] Rocky-8-ec2-8.6-20220515.0.x86_64

[mroche]

The State of EPEL presentation is now on YouTube:

Here's the playlist from the June 2022 CentOS Dojo for those that are interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...pR2IS4Db2wZZt0

Cheers,
Mike

[mroche]

The post above from mroche gives some insight (pretty sure he's a red hatter

I am indeed, just over my one year mark earlier this month

I should clarify that my post was not about refuting growth/usage patterns or trying to change the framing of this discussion. It was purely to demonstrate a more appropriate and accurate parsing of the dataset; removing that group produces a much higher signal-to-noise ratio in terms of determining how many potential end-users and servers are actually using EPEL. Of course, not every Enterprise Linux server is going to be consuming EPEL content, and it doesn't account for systems behind internal content mirrors. What the countme data does provide is a decent baseline as to the overall adoption and health of the Enterprise Linux community.

If I can speak candidly, as it's a train of thought I see come up in different spaces, I see no reason for any distribution to be aiming to take or be framed to be vying for CentOS Linux's prior spot in this ecosystem. All of the groups and users participating add to the Enterprise Linux community and that's ultimately a net benefit for everyone. The only thing I can ask is for everyone to be as open as possible and not to try and create silos or islands for their distributions.

Cheers,
Mike

[dragon321]

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.

Maybe not very easy but certainly easier than to different distro.

[michaelo2]

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

Do you mean ELS? Extended Life-cycle Support for RHEL6 started on 2020-12-01 and is usually renewed yearly, but has no relationship with any other "annual maintenance agreement". RHEL subscription terms are based on when they're purchased, not all of them are purchased on the same date by all global customers.

[cardich]

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

[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.

[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.

[Paradigm Shifter]

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

[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?