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Is anyone aware of a decent reference comparing say Alma and Rocky? I imagine the 'product' is essentially the same, but policies or procedures may differ - an

• freedomben 4y ago
  Disclaimer: Former Red Hat employee My info might be slightly outdated cause last I looked into it was a few months ago, but I would guess it's not terribly different. Yes both are essentially the same product. Main differences from user perspective are reliability of package servers and speed of updates, plus community experience if you get involved there (friendly tip: I suggest you stay the hell away from the cess pool that is Reddit. That whole site probably needs to die in a fire) *Alma Linux:* - Works closer with upstream (actually sends patches and participates with dev on CentOS) - Backed by a for-profit company (which I consider a good thing for longevity and reliability, but of course there's a risk of profit and community incentives misalignment) - Fastest on updates when upstream releases - Friendly and appreciative (generally speaking) toward Red Hat (without which none of their business would be possible) *Rocky Linux* - "Community" owned, but backed by some corporate money - Very volunteer-run. Have some paid employees working on but many volunteers - Hostile (and sometimes hateful) toward Red Hat I mostly use CentOS Stream though and that has been rock solid. I use Alma on my router and on a prod database server that will be nearly impossible to rebuild that I migrated to Alma from Cent, but CentOS feels better to me now than it did before changing to Stream.
  • rubyist5eva 4y ago
    What are you going to do when support for CentOS Stream 8 ends in 2024? Alma Linux 8 is supported until 2029 at least - for me it's a no brainer to use Alma for something like a database server.
    • dralley 4y ago
      The same thing all the Debian and Ubuntu LTS and OpenSUSE Leap users would do, upgrade to a newer release. 10 years of unpaid support has always been an anomaly that no other LTS distro provided.
      • rubyist5eva 4y ago
        Debian, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE Leap all support in-place upgrades between major versions. RedHat/CentOS do not.
        • mroche 4y ago
          Red Hat does support in-place upgrades for RHEL via Leapp, and the process around this has been improving. Granted I know in the past this process was... sub-optimal and restrictive. It is true that CentOS has not supported this. I am hoping we can achieve a "dnf system-upgrade" process on RHEL, but we'll see how that goes. RHEL 7 -> RHEL 8: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/upgrading_from_rhel_7_to_rhel_8/index https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... RHEL 8 -> RHEL 9: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/upgrading_from_rhel_8_to_rhel_9/index https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... We still recommend having strong backup, rebuild, and automation strategies regardless. I personally would rather spin up a side system, ensure everything works, and nuke the original. That would apply to either test a in-place upgrade or a from-scratch build.
          • rubyist5eva 4y ago
            I’ve only ever heard negative things about Leapp and it always seemed like an unloved side thing, which is why I didn’t mention it.
        • worthless-trash 4y ago
          I have dealt with many, many customers who update between major versions on RHEL while working in RH support.