AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL

With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-No-1-1-RHEL

[Barley9432]

So exactly what CentOS Stream is doing, but instead Stream actually contributes to upstream instead of being leeches feeding of RedHat and giving nothing in return.

Hopefully these leech rebuilds like Alma, Rocky, Oracle all shutdown. They have been taking advantage of the good will of open source for far too long.

[Linuxxx]

In the end, all of this uncertainty around RHEL will undoubtedly boost the adoption of Ubuntu LTS in enterprises, especially in non-US[A] territories.

And with China's openKylin essentially depending upon Ubuntu as its foundation, Canonical has indeed a very bright future ahead...

[novideo]

Oracle, Alma, and Rocky should team up and at least maintain compatibility between themselves, and API/ABI compatibility with RHEL. Then in 2025 Oracle should base the next version of Oracle Linux on Debian 13 instead of RHEL, and commercialize it by selling 8-10 year support contracts like RHEL does, but unlike Ubuntu, maintain full compatibility with Debian. The Debian volunteers will still give Oracle reduced maintenance burden, like RHEL did, and they can improve their PR by employing Debian engineers and contributing everything upstream, improve Debian upstream, release ZFS under a license compatible with mainline Linux, and join the OIN. They may never have another chance this big to improve their image, so they better not miss it.

[CTown]

I completely understand the need for a free version of RHEL. It has been the standard over a long time.

Still, is there a reason why Suse's offering can't fill the void for most people? Isn't OpenSuse the Suse version of CentOS? What does SLES/OpenSuse lack so a community can build around it instead of RHEL/Rocky or Alma.

[mirmirmir]

I appreciate them for stepping up and being the first to be honest 👏👏

[Chugworth]

Oracle, Alma, and Rocky should team up and at least maintain compatibility between themselves, and API/ABI compatibility with RHEL. Then in 2025 Oracle should base the next version of Oracle Linux on Debian 13 instead of RHEL, and commercialize it by selling 8-10 year support contracts like RHEL does, but unlike Ubuntu, maintain full compatibility with Debian. The Debian volunteers will still give Oracle reduced maintenance burden, like RHEL did, and they can improve their PR by employing Debian engineers and contributing everything upstream, improve Debian upstream, release ZFS under a license compatible with mainline Linux, and join the OIN. They may never have a chance this big to change their image, so they better not miss it.

Basically taking Red Hat's work and rebranding it seems beneath what such a major corporation like Oracle should be doing. I mean, it should be an embarrassment for them to release something like that. I agree though that a better path for them would be to help fund and contribute to the Debian development, and use that as a basis for an "enterprise" release where they include things like ZFS. Solaris seems pretty dead at this point, so why would they just sit on ZFS and not do anything with it?

[patrick1946]

In the end, all of this uncertainty around RHEL will undoubtedly boost the adoption of Ubuntu LTS in enterprises, especially in non-US[A] territories.

And with China's openKylin essentially depending upon Ubuntu as its foundation, Canonical has indeed a very bright future ahead...

Do you work for Canonical? 😎

[patrick1946]

I think what we here see is greed in action. I mean from all actors. It will be interesting if in the long run it will hurt them.

[Sonadow]

In the end, all of this uncertainty around RHEL will undoubtedly boost the adoption of Ubuntu LTS in enterprises, especially in non-US[A] territories.

And with China's openKylin essentially depending upon Ubuntu as its foundation, Canonical has indeed a very bright future ahead...

Most reports claim that OpenKylin built its own repositories and are not using Canonical's.

But nobody have bothered to check whether the packages in OPenKylin's repositories are newer or older than Canonical's.

I love UKUI and OpenKylin is definitely promising but will not bother to use it until there is confirmation UKUI can run a full Wayland desktop session and that there is at least GTK 4.5 and Qt6.4 in the base repos.

Also, not having snap and flatpak is a huge plus in my book.