AlmaLinux's ELevate Begins Handling EPEL Repositories

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AlmaLinux's ELevate Begins Handling EPEL Repositories

AlmaLinux's ELevate software is a wonderful utility to help ease migration between existing major versions of RHEL derivatives. In particular, it's been very useful for moving past CentOS 7 and/or upgrading from AlmaLinux 8 to 9, along with the ability to even move to other RHEL derivatives...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AlmaLinux-ELevate-EPEL

[sophisticles]

I recently wasted 20 minutes of my life on both Alma and Rocky and i have to say they are both garbage.

Each of them claims that they have a major sponsor that gives each of them 1 million dollars and a bunch of smaller sponsors that give them additional funds.

I find it hard to believe that either if a million dollar OS, I find I find it hard to believe they are a dollar OS.

I broke both of them inside of a few minutes, just by trying to enable the fusion repos, something that you can find instructions on how to do all over the net and something that in theory should be supported considering Rocky explicitly thanks Fedora for being upstream from them.

I also have trouble wrapping my head around this whole incestuous relationship between Red Hat and all these "Baby Bells".

Red Hat, as a Linux OS, has existed since 1994. In the early 2000's, MS was being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department for being a supposed illegal monopoly and MS basically decided to create a competitor by giving RH a billion dollars.

Red Hat took the money, restructured the corporation and spun off Fedora, a perpetually beta distro that would serve as a testing ground for stuff they wanted to include in their Enterprise Edition.

Up until there I get it, Red Hat wanted a guinea pig so they didn't give their Enterprise customers half-baked software and Fedora users fit that bill nicely.

Then it starts getting confusing. A bunch of Red Hat clones, like Scientific/Fermi Linux were created and one of them was CentOS.

Whereas the other clones were available for free, CentOS seemed to have been created to compete Red Hat's official distro and if i recall correctly, RH supported this for a time.

At some point RH realized they were being taken for suckers and absorbed CentOS into Red Hat in order to eliminate a competitor.

Somewhere along the lines a bunch of Fedora spins and clones were created, because one can never have too many RH clones.

Now we have Alma and Rocky and some others, that were taking and want to keep taking, the RH sources, stripping out the RH branding, and releasing their offering as bit for bit compatible with RH's official offering and clearly there's a lot of money at stake because as i mentioned Rocky and Alma claim to rake in at least a million bucks a year from just one sponsor.

The real slap in the face is to the Fedora project, as they get a thank you but according to one poster that claimed to be associated with the Fedora KDE spin, they don't get a dime for their work.

Furthermore, you realize that all these Red Hat clones are basically stealing RH's work because of two things, in order to be bit for bit compatible they can't change a single thing from the official offering and more importantly, RH release 9.3 and within hours everyone else released their version built from 9.3 sources, including some based in Europe and Asia.

Which brings me to the last question, how are all these vendors doing what they are doing?

I thought RH had taken steps to block them from getting the source code, did RH back off?

If not, were did Alma, Rocky, Euro, get the sources to build their versions?

At this point i am tired of all of them, i would mush rather if they hired a board of directors with a vision and combined all the projects into one distro, with the aim of creating the best damn OS,

I am talking about Rocky, Alma, Euro, Oracle, and Fedora. Stop worrying about Red Hat, most of them are flush with cash from corporate sponsorships, work together not in the half-assed open source way, where someone somewhere releases code that someone else can use, but in a structured corporate way, this is what we agree a distro should offer, we will work on this and you will work on that and we have a deadline that on 6 months we will have a functioning product for general testing.

Once we iron out all the kinks, we stop updating packages for the sake of incrementing the release numbers, we work one creating an all-encompassing API like DX, we work on creating unique custom applications that the general public wants.

Windows has been such a successful product because of how stable and reliable it was. I have seen old cash registers still in use today that run Windows CE, a Dreamcast OS still works today, I know people that still use computers running 32-but XP SP2, i personally used 2k SP4 for years and same with XP64, and people still cling to Win 7 for dear life.

The Linux world seems to have the opposite sickness, that they need to constantly be updating everything, they can never mark a product as final.

The problem is that one update can break a Linux system in no time.

The Linux ecosystem really needs to reevaluate how they do things.

[panikal]

The Linux world seems to have the opposite sickness, that they need to constantly be updating everything, they can never mark a product as final.

The problem is that one update can break a Linux system in no time.

The Linux ecosystem really needs to reevaluate how they do things.

My own org is on centos 9 stream now. We have a world wide set of data centers with many tens of thousands of bare metal servers. We test and manage our releases anyway, stream is no different (for us) than the pointed releases (so far anyway). I know another place that went to Rocky 9. They've had no problems other than normal migration related pipeline stuff that they had going from 6 to 7.

Updates are updates and have always broken things. Windows CE works fine like dreamcast? So does slackware 2 if you install it on a 486. What are you complaining about? Those things aren't networked on the internet and aren't serving millions of customers where you want fast updates on performance and security.

[Antennae5101]

Best treat'em like cattle, not pets.

[mSparks]

I thought RH had taken steps to block them from getting the source code, did RH back off?

Redhat only ever repackaged other peoples source code and slapped their branding on it, they aren't even making a server OS anymore - they are now trying to compete with android and/or cisco

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2023/06/29/nokia-and-red-hat-announce-partnership-for-new-best-in-class-telecommunications-solutions-based-on-red-hat-infrastructure-platforms-and-nokias-core-network-applications/

[spicfoo]

Redhat only ever repackaged other peoples source code and slapped their branding on it

Nah, I can't speak to their business changes but they do contribute heavily to many core components including the kernel, glibc, gcc etc.

[mSparks]

Nah, I can't speak to their business changes but they do contribute heavily to many core components including the kernel, glibc, gcc etc.

Oh, they contribute plenty to other peoples code as well. then slap their branding on it and sell it as their own.

[spicfoo]

Oh, they contribute plenty to other peoples code as well. then slap their branding on it and sell it as their own.

They are not just repackaging. They contribute code upstream. Then they sell support services certifications etc just like all other commercial distributions and various consulting companies based on their expertise. What’s your beef with that?

[mSparks]

What’s your beef with that?

that, nothing really.

But recently they crossed the threshold into outright software pirates, so now they dont get any credit for anything they may or may not have done in the past.

f em, and the horse they rode in on.

[spicfoo]

that, nothing really.

But recently they crossed the threshold into outright software pirates, so now they dont get any credit for anything they may or may not have done in the past.

f em, and the horse they road in on.

How did they become pirates? They still contribute code upstream as usual. They still publish sources in https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/ The only change I can see is that they do make every tag available corresponding to their source rpms in their public branch which no license has ever required. It hasn't really changed anything substantial about rebuilders like Alma, Rocky, SUSE, Oracle who all continue to do their thing. What am I missing?