12 ms·

AlmaLinux – Our Value Is Our Values

178 points by mroche 3y ago

freedomben 3y ago
AlmaLinux, thank you for taking the constructive/positive approach that you do. Red Hat is not our enemy, and although they've made decisions that are disappointing, I deeply appreciate that you aren't antagonistic toward them, and in fact add value to them. This is why I chose and use AlmaLinux for many things. The contrast between you and the others is big, and I'm very grateful that you are what you are. And thank you for improving this ecosystem!
INTPenis 3y ago
AlmaLinux should just start their own RHEL, with blackjack and hookers... They have a company behind them, they have values, so why ride Red Hats coattails? Start your own distro. They could even try and make it somewhat compatible with RHEL, in the sense that famous proprietary software like EMC and Dell stuff could run on it. A lot of times it's just a matter of having the right RPMs, environments and strings in all the right places to get them to run.
- jacooper 3y ago
  You mean cloudlinux? They are already forging their own way, giving up on RHEL 1:1 compatibility in the process. https://blog.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux-os-8-and-9-in-post-redhat-world https://blog.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux-os-8-and-9-in-post-re...
  - gbraad 3y ago
    that is with a big 'if'. but honestly, they should. differentiate and add value. not just copy and reproduce something you can't control
- vbezhenar 3y ago
  Nobody needs yet another linux distro. People want free RHEL.
  - davisr 3y ago
    Red Hat's Mike McGrath explains [1]: > Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license. But they don't actually want the code because as I've said over and over, its not about the code (Free as in freedom). The code is out there (as proven by the fact that none of these rebuilders stopped nor will they stop) [1]: https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/14l2t86/im_done_with_red_hat_enterprise_linux/jq4zgh6/?context=10 https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/14l2t86/im_done_with_red... It's clear that all the misinformation about RHEL, misinterpretations of the GPL, et al. are not actually about those issues. There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat. Become familiar with the "Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation" [2] and you will see them everywhere. [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin.com/raw/irj4Fyd5 https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin....
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      > There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat. Red Hat is the one who put it behind a wall to begin with. You reap what you sow.
      - davisr 3y ago
        They haven't put anything behind a wall. You want CentOS Stream and RHEL source code? Then go get it! Here it is! [1] [1]: https://git.centos.org/ https://git.centos.org/ When you buy RHEL, you even get the entire source code on a DVD for the exact binary distribution that you download.
        grosswait 3y ago
        https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...
        creatonez 3y ago
        The repository you linked previously contained RHEL source code, but it is no longer being updated as of a few weeks ago. This is the entire thing being discussed. Really weird for you to be grandstanding about how misinformation is bad, while spreading it yourself.
- silisili 3y ago
  Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle. Distros for a lot of corps are sticky. People just want their RPMs/scripts/etc to work, and not have to pay Red Hat. Hopefully this changes more with time to a more best-man-wins system, as there are a lot of really good distros out there already.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle. They also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping free install CDs to people all over the world and piggy-backing off of the Debian community's progress. All so they could (almost two decades later) put small dent into Red Hat's enterprise entrenchment. You would need to offer a significantly better product than RHEL, if you hoped to unseat them.
    - mistrial9 3y ago
      you are right, but there is news.. on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        Ubuntu is also more popular with home users by a good margin. That has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise entrenchment.
- sliken 3y ago
  Why split the community? Alma has been helping to improve the upstream already, why double the work to improve two distros instead of one?
- brnt 3y ago
  Why start your own RHEL (or fork of it), when you could help a friendly base such as Debian LTS?
powersnail 3y ago
This situation is somewhat confusing, as someone who doesn't have a RedHat subscription. Rocky and Alma claim that RH's new policy is a hindrance to the re-distribution of RH's code, while RH's staff claims that "Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license". Some genuine questions: 1. If Bob doesn't currently have a RedHat subscription, does he have a way to obtain RHEL source code, legally, continuously, without the help of a current subscriber, and for free? 2. If Bob has a RedHat subscription, and has access to RHEL source code through the customer portal, is he free to continuously re-publish the source code else where? (in other words, facing no legal threat, and won't be cut off the subscription) 3. RH's staff mentioned "GPL'ed code", so it sort of implies the possibility that some other code are not GPL'ed, and might be subject to less favorable terms regarding redistribution. So, are all the code authored by RH and re-distributed by Rocky/Alma licensed with GPL? Or in other words, are there code whose re-distributability changes with the new policy of RedHat?
- None4U 3y ago
  1. no 2. subscription will be cut off 3. they used to be gpl and still are
  - powersnail 3y ago
    Thanks!
  - 3np 3y ago
    Is there a source for 2 or is this just speculation?
xinayder 3y ago
EPEL Fedora maintainers should just stop updating their packages, if RHEL uses Fedora packages, just stop updating them or make them available explicitly for Red Hat through closed sources that you need to pay for. Fight fire with fire. I have little faith that RHEL will change, especially after that blog post from the vice-president calling AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux "freeloaders" and that they bring no value to RHEL. They are the reason RHEL is as big as it is today and they're actively fighting against what made them big.
- davisr 3y ago
  Red Hat never called anyone "freeloaders" in any of their blog posts. Also, there is nothing wrong with making people pay for free software. That is explicitly in the philosophy of free software and the GNU Project. > Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on. Read more: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
throw_a_grenade 3y ago
> We have also enriched the upstream community. AlmaLinux community members have submitted PRs to projects such as RPM, AWX, and VirtualBox. Our community has sent over 50 PRs to GlusterFS and also extended openQA. A Red Hat employee even thanked us for enabling Fedora tests to run on ELN and RHEL. An AlmaLinux contributor (who was formerly an ArchLinux user) was so fired up by our community that he now maintains over 600 Fedora and Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) packages, including some widely-used ones like certbot, brotli, iperf3, imapsync, and countless Python libraries, many of them as the primary contributor maintaining them for the greater Fedora and Enterprise Linux ecosystem. EPEL is tremendously important to both Red Hat and RHEL users. I wasn't aware of this. So it's looks like RH/IBM argument that they don't contribute back is bullsh*t.
- itsmartapuntocm 3y ago
  It was always a bad faith argument.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/t/jpoeunh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/t/jpoeunh/ tl;dr: there are some contributions, mostly not to RHEL but to the surrounding ecosystem (including RHEL's upstream), so it apparently doesn't count.
  - throw_a_grenade 3y ago
    So it doesn't count when AlmaLinux does contribute upstream, but somehow counts when RH contributes and has this "100% upstream policy"? Is this RH's argument?
    - freedomben 3y ago
      Don't read one guy's opinion on Reddit and attribute it to the whole company. There are surely others who agree with him, and others who don't. This is the kind of dumb stuff that leads to most tech companies barring employees from saying anything. Let's stay reasonable.
chasil 3y ago
We have not yet heard anything from Oracle, which hopefully implies that these changes are not a problem. Alma had previously stated that Oracle would be an upstream source. "In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released." https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ Rocky has said that they have found "a path forward," but have not divulged it. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/?td=rt-3a https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...
- freedomben 3y ago
  > We have not yet heard anything from Oracle, which hopefully implies that these changes are not a problem. Giant corps move slowly, and companies like Oracle will require official communication only, which moves even slower. I think it's too early to read anything into it.
- highwind 3y ago
  Rocky posted an update: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/ https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/
  - chasil 3y ago
    I just saw that. "Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered... Another method... is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata."
    - madars 3y ago
      I wonder how stable the cloud path is ... can RedHat have cloud vendors "voluntarily agree" to not spin up VMs for rebuilders? (Kinda like how subscribers "agree" that distributing GPL'd sources could put their subscription renewal in jeopardy.)
MangoCoffee 3y ago
Is SUSE Linux not an option for Enterprise?
- freedomben 3y ago
  I evaluted SUSE quite a bit some years ago, and I ran into a handful of problems that were (at the time at least) showstoppers. The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line, which for me was super confusing but also not viable on headless systems (which is most of them). There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs. This was all at least 5 years ago, maybe 10, so take with a grain of salt. I'm sure if I really learned the system it would be fine, but I've got two decades of the Red Hat Way engrained in me. It would be hard to change.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    >The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line This doesn't make any sense. I've been using OpenSUSE for a decade and there's no package that can be installed via Yast (the GUI) but not via zypper (the CLI). >There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs. Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      > Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format. This is absolutely not obvious to a person coming from EL/Fedora (which is the context we are discussing here). Things that are "obvious" to an existing user are not necessarily obvious to new users.
      - 3y ago
TZubiri 3y ago
[flagged]
- anthk 3y ago
  This is not gratis but libre.
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  "Nothing more than slavery, don't contribute to gratis software" So no RHEL then? (Where is their 'upstream' if not libre? What kernel would they run?)
  - TZubiri 3y ago
    If I understand correctly, redhat contributes economically with the Linux Foundation.
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  What software do you use? If it’s based on FLOSS in any capacity, then by your definition you’re a slave driver.
- codetrotter 3y ago
  > Apparently anyone that charges money for their products is evil, and those who work for free have 'values'. The linked post says nothing of the sort.
wandering23 3y ago
The only things that is lacking in linux ecosystem is hardwares. macOS has Macbooks. Windows has surface, Samsung. Linux has ??? That's a new startup idea, right there.
- jacooper 3y ago
  This is unrelated, as Almalinux is largely a server distro. But Linux has System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook, also Dell and Framework, though they aren't Linux first.
- toyg 3y ago
  Lol, "new"... Iirc, KDE almost self-destroyed by chasing the dream of making tablets; Nokia took half a decade to build a working linux-based OS (and then binned it); same for Intel... Consumer hardware is hard to pull off, to start with. Then there are tons of components requiring closed-source drivers that don't play well with Linux; you can spend a lot of money to rewrite them, or you can build piles of weak hacks that will crash your OS every few hours. You need deep pockets to get OEMs to pay attention to your needs, rather than the needs of giant manufacturers hungry for their production lines. Managing prices on small runs is extremely hard, so your 1.0 is going to be prohibitively expensive, which means it won't sell, which means you won't have the money to fix all the problems
- andix 3y ago
  Android? :D
  - wandering23 3y ago
    [dead]
- fuzzylightbulb 3y ago
  Something like 90% of webservers are running Linux. Alma, RedHat, etc are primarily focused on enterprise servers, not consumer devices. But since you are looking for consumer devices running Linux, I recommend you check out Android, which is running on nearly 3/4 of mobile devices globally.

178 points by mroche 3y ago

AlmaLinux, thank you for taking the constructive/positive approach that you do. Red Hat is not our enemy, and although they've made decisions that are disappointing, I deeply appreciate that you aren't antagonistic toward them, and in fact add value to them. This is why I chose and use AlmaLinux for many things. The contrast between you and the others is big, and I'm very grateful that you are what you are. And thank you for improving this ecosystem!

INTPenis 3y ago

AlmaLinux should just start their own RHEL, with blackjack and hookers... They have a company behind them, they have values, so why ride Red Hats coattails? Start your own distro. They could even try and make it somewhat compatible with RHEL, in the sense that famous proprietary software like EMC and Dell stuff could run on it. A lot of times it's just a matter of having the right RPMs, environments and strings in all the right places to get them to run.

jacooper 3y ago
You mean cloudlinux? They are already forging their own way, giving up on RHEL 1:1 compatibility in the process. https://blog.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux-os-8-and-9-in-post-redhat-world https://blog.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux-os-8-and-9-in-post-re...
- gbraad 3y ago
  that is with a big 'if'. but honestly, they should. differentiate and add value. not just copy and reproduce something you can't control
vbezhenar 3y ago
Nobody needs yet another linux distro. People want free RHEL.
- davisr 3y ago
  Red Hat's Mike McGrath explains [1]: > Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license. But they don't actually want the code because as I've said over and over, its not about the code (Free as in freedom). The code is out there (as proven by the fact that none of these rebuilders stopped nor will they stop) [1]: https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/14l2t86/im_done_with_red_hat_enterprise_linux/jq4zgh6/?context=10 https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/14l2t86/im_done_with_red... It's clear that all the misinformation about RHEL, misinterpretations of the GPL, et al. are not actually about those issues. There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat. Become familiar with the "Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation" [2] and you will see them everywhere. [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin.com/raw/irj4Fyd5 https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin....
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    > There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat. Red Hat is the one who put it behind a wall to begin with. You reap what you sow.
    - davisr 3y ago
      They haven't put anything behind a wall. You want CentOS Stream and RHEL source code? Then go get it! Here it is! [1] [1]: https://git.centos.org/ https://git.centos.org/ When you buy RHEL, you even get the entire source code on a DVD for the exact binary distribution that you download.
      - grosswait 3y ago
        https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...
      - creatonez 3y ago
        The repository you linked previously contained RHEL source code, but it is no longer being updated as of a few weeks ago. This is the entire thing being discussed. Really weird for you to be grandstanding about how misinformation is bad, while spreading it yourself.
silisili 3y ago
Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle. Distros for a lot of corps are sticky. People just want their RPMs/scripts/etc to work, and not have to pay Red Hat. Hopefully this changes more with time to a more best-man-wins system, as there are a lot of really good distros out there already.
- deaddodo 3y ago
  > Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle. They also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping free install CDs to people all over the world and piggy-backing off of the Debian community's progress. All so they could (almost two decades later) put small dent into Red Hat's enterprise entrenchment. You would need to offer a significantly better product than RHEL, if you hoped to unseat them.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    you are right, but there is news.. on AWS in go-go years, Ubuntu with easy defaults and permissive licenses became the number one installed VM .. by a very large margin. The numbers were not even close.. like 15x more daily volume of VMs on AWS than the next closest three or whatever.. look for yourself. That in turn begat the very hot breath of MSFT upon Ubuntu-Canonical, which shows in the boot signing keys for Ubuntu, the MSFT-private partition type in the disk installer, and the WSL. MSFT influences can be seen in the push for always-on snap with libc and unattended-upgrades phone home and the like.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      Ubuntu is also more popular with home users by a good margin. That has absolutely nothing to do with enterprise entrenchment.
sliken 3y ago
Why split the community? Alma has been helping to improve the upstream already, why double the work to improve two distros instead of one?
brnt 3y ago
Why start your own RHEL (or fork of it), when you could help a friendly base such as Debian LTS?

powersnail 3y ago

This situation is somewhat confusing, as someone who doesn't have a RedHat subscription. Rocky and Alma claim that RH's new policy is a hindrance to the re-distribution of RH's code, while RH's staff claims that "Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license". Some genuine questions: 1. If Bob doesn't currently have a RedHat subscription, does he have a way to obtain RHEL source code, legally, continuously, without the help of a current subscriber, and for free? 2. If Bob has a RedHat subscription, and has access to RHEL source code through the customer portal, is he free to continuously re-publish the source code else where? (in other words, facing no legal threat, and won't be cut off the subscription) 3. RH's staff mentioned "GPL'ed code", so it sort of implies the possibility that some other code are not GPL'ed, and might be subject to less favorable terms regarding redistribution. So, are all the code authored by RH and re-distributed by Rocky/Alma licensed with GPL? Or in other words, are there code whose re-distributability changes with the new policy of RedHat?

None4U 3y ago
1. no 2. subscription will be cut off 3. they used to be gpl and still are
- powersnail 3y ago
  Thanks!
- 3np 3y ago
  Is there a source for 2 or is this just speculation?

xinayder 3y ago

EPEL Fedora maintainers should just stop updating their packages, if RHEL uses Fedora packages, just stop updating them or make them available explicitly for Red Hat through closed sources that you need to pay for. Fight fire with fire. I have little faith that RHEL will change, especially after that blog post from the vice-president calling AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux "freeloaders" and that they bring no value to RHEL. They are the reason RHEL is as big as it is today and they're actively fighting against what made them big.

davisr 3y ago
Red Hat never called anyone "freeloaders" in any of their blog posts. Also, there is nothing wrong with making people pay for free software. That is explicitly in the philosophy of free software and the GNU Project. > Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. > Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on. Read more: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

throw_a_grenade 3y ago

> We have also enriched the upstream community. AlmaLinux community members have submitted PRs to projects such as RPM, AWX, and VirtualBox. Our community has sent over 50 PRs to GlusterFS and also extended openQA. A Red Hat employee even thanked us for enabling Fedora tests to run on ELN and RHEL. An AlmaLinux contributor (who was formerly an ArchLinux user) was so fired up by our community that he now maintains over 600 Fedora and Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) packages, including some widely-used ones like certbot, brotli, iperf3, imapsync, and countless Python libraries, many of them as the primary contributor maintaining them for the greater Fedora and Enterprise Linux ecosystem. EPEL is tremendously important to both Red Hat and RHEL users. I wasn't aware of this. So it's looks like RH/IBM argument that they don't contribute back is bullsh*t.

itsmartapuntocm 3y ago
It was always a bad faith argument.
5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/t/jpoeunh/ https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/t/jpoeunh/ tl;dr: there are some contributions, mostly not to RHEL but to the surrounding ecosystem (including RHEL's upstream), so it apparently doesn't count.
- throw_a_grenade 3y ago
  So it doesn't count when AlmaLinux does contribute upstream, but somehow counts when RH contributes and has this "100% upstream policy"? Is this RH's argument?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Don't read one guy's opinion on Reddit and attribute it to the whole company. There are surely others who agree with him, and others who don't. This is the kind of dumb stuff that leads to most tech companies barring employees from saying anything. Let's stay reasonable.

chasil 3y ago

We have not yet heard anything from Oracle, which hopefully implies that these changes are not a problem. Alma had previously stated that Oracle would be an upstream source. "In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released." https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ Rocky has said that they have found "a path forward," but have not divulged it. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/?td=rt-3a https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...

freedomben 3y ago
> We have not yet heard anything from Oracle, which hopefully implies that these changes are not a problem. Giant corps move slowly, and companies like Oracle will require official communication only, which moves even slower. I think it's too early to read anything into it.
highwind 3y ago
Rocky posted an update: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/ https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/
- chasil 3y ago
  I just saw that. "Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered... Another method... is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata."
  - madars 3y ago
    I wonder how stable the cloud path is ... can RedHat have cloud vendors "voluntarily agree" to not spin up VMs for rebuilders? (Kinda like how subscribers "agree" that distributing GPL'd sources could put their subscription renewal in jeopardy.)

MangoCoffee 3y ago

Is SUSE Linux not an option for Enterprise?

freedomben 3y ago
I evaluted SUSE quite a bit some years ago, and I ran into a handful of problems that were (at the time at least) showstoppers. The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line, which for me was super confusing but also not viable on headless systems (which is most of them). There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs. This was all at least 5 years ago, maybe 10, so take with a grain of salt. I'm sure if I really learned the system it would be fine, but I've got two decades of the Red Hat Way engrained in me. It would be hard to change.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  >The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line This doesn't make any sense. I've been using OpenSUSE for a decade and there's no package that can be installed via Yast (the GUI) but not via zypper (the CLI). >There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs. Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format. This is absolutely not obvious to a person coming from EL/Fedora (which is the context we are discussing here). Things that are "obvious" to an existing user are not necessarily obvious to new users.
    - 3y ago

TZubiri 3y ago

[flagged]

anthk 3y ago
This is not gratis but libre.
2b3a51 3y ago
"Nothing more than slavery, don't contribute to gratis software" So no RHEL then? (Where is their 'upstream' if not libre? What kernel would they run?)
- TZubiri 3y ago
  If I understand correctly, redhat contributes economically with the Linux Foundation.
tourmalinetaco 3y ago
What software do you use? If it’s based on FLOSS in any capacity, then by your definition you’re a slave driver.
codetrotter 3y ago
> Apparently anyone that charges money for their products is evil, and those who work for free have 'values'. The linked post says nothing of the sort.

wandering23 3y ago

The only things that is lacking in linux ecosystem is hardwares. macOS has Macbooks. Windows has surface, Samsung. Linux has ??? That's a new startup idea, right there.

jacooper 3y ago
This is unrelated, as Almalinux is largely a server distro. But Linux has System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook, also Dell and Framework, though they aren't Linux first.
toyg 3y ago
Lol, "new"... Iirc, KDE almost self-destroyed by chasing the dream of making tablets; Nokia took half a decade to build a working linux-based OS (and then binned it); same for Intel... Consumer hardware is hard to pull off, to start with. Then there are tons of components requiring closed-source drivers that don't play well with Linux; you can spend a lot of money to rewrite them, or you can build piles of weak hacks that will crash your OS every few hours. You need deep pockets to get OEMs to pay attention to your needs, rather than the needs of giant manufacturers hungry for their production lines. Managing prices on small runs is extremely hard, so your 1.0 is going to be prohibitively expensive, which means it won't sell, which means you won't have the money to fix all the problems
andix 3y ago
Android? :D
- wandering23 3y ago
  [dead]
fuzzylightbulb 3y ago
Something like 90% of webservers are running Linux. Alma, RedHat, etc are primarily focused on enterprise servers, not consumer devices. But since you are looking for consumer devices running Linux, I recommend you check out Android, which is running on nearly 3/4 of mobile devices globally.