> Absorption and "Rebranding and Repositioning" of CentOS both done after IBM acquisition. RedHat is not a company anymore. It's a department under IBM.

You're wrong. CentOS Stream was announced September/October 2019, too close to the IBM announcement to be an IBM decision; it had been in the works for quite some time before, and in fact this all started in 2014 when Red Hat acquihired CentOS.

From 2014 to ~2020 you were under the impression that nothing had changed, but Red Hat had never cared about CentOS-the-free-RHEL. All that Red Hat cared about was CentOS as the basis for developing their other products (e.g. OpenStack and OpenShift), and when Red Hat came up with CentOS Stream as a better way to do that, Red Hat did not need CentOS Linux anymore.

Anyhow, I've been through that and other stuff as an employee, and I'm pretty sure Red Hat is more than able to occasionally fuck up on its own, without any need for interference from IBM.

Bug for bug is a sham and always was. It's a disservice to users to only clone something.

Underneath it all, compatibility is what matters. At AlmaLinux we still target RHEL minor versions and will continue to do so. We're a clone in the sense of full compatibility but a derivative in the sense that we can do some extra things now. This is far, far better for users and also let's us actually contribute upstream and have more of a mutually beneficial relationship with RH versus just taking.

I'll say it depends.

Sometimes the hardware or the software you run requires exact versions of the packages with some specific behavior to work correctly. These include drivers' parts on both kernel and userland, some specific application which requires a very specific version of a library, so on and so forth.

I for one, can use Alma for 99% of the time instead of the old CentOS, but it's not always possible, if you're running cutting edge datacenter hardware. And when you run that hardware as a research center, this small distinction cuts a lot deeper.

Otherwise, taking the LEAPP and migrating to Alma or Rocky for that matter is a no-brainer for an experienced groups of admins. But, when computer says no, there's no arguing in that.

If you're running cutting edge datacenter hardware, CentOS is a better fit now than it ever has been before. It will be the first to get support for new hardware within a major version, ahead of RHEL and all it's derivatives. It is possible that some hardware doesn't get support within the current major version of any of these related distros, and you'll have to wait until the next major version, which CentOS also does first before the rest.

We don't change the expected versions. We might patch/backport more to them if there are issues, but the versions remain.

Basically the goal is still to fit the exact situation you just brought up. I'm not aware of this ever not being the case if it weren't to be the case for some reason, then we have a problem we need to fix.

All of the extra stuff we do, patch, etc. is with exactly what you just stated in mind.

I'll be installing a set of small servers in the near future. I'll be retrying Alma in a couple of them, to give it another chance.

As I said, in some cases Rocky is a better CentOS replacement than Alma is.

But to be crystal clear, I do not discount Alma as a distribution or belittle the effort behind it. Derivative, clone or from scratch, keeping a distro alive is a tremendous amount of work. I did it, and know it.

It's just me selecting the tools depending on a suitability score, and pragmatism. Not beef, not fanaticism, nothing in that vein.

Sustainability is one of the core reasons why we are not using RHEL SRPMs to build AlmaLinux. RH doesn't want us doing that, and doing so would be unsustainable and bring into question the future of AlmaLinux as it can, and likely will, turn into a game of cat/mouse getting those SRPMs :)

Let us know if you have any issues!

Red Hat bringing CentOS in-house (well before IBM entered the picture) was IMO one of the first in a string of expedient decisions that were... unfortunate. When I was at Red Hat I loudly argued against some of the ways things were handled but I also understand why various actions were taken when they were.

I'd also argue that CentOS classic was mostly bug for bug compatible but probably close enough for most. It shared sources but did use a different (complex) build system as I understand it.

That closeness allowed CentOS to be a drop-in replacement for RHEL for thousands of installations and exotic hardware combinations. Unfortunately, we don't have this capability anymore. Rocky bears most of that load now.

Despite being a debian/ubuntu guy, I usually used CentOS for production deployments because it would be easy and seamless to upgrade to RHEL when I hit the big leagues.

Not anymore. I just use the latest ubuntu LTS and call it a day.

IBM/RedHat was soo predictably short sighted on this.

So you say "it would be easy and seamless", but did you ever actually do it and upgrade to RHEL? Because most people throw that out as a supposed sales pipeline that was lost, but the real life metrics indicate that almost never happened.

In one case, yes.

The free LTS/distro and pay for support if you feel like it never really worked financially. Maybe Canonical is profitable at this point. It's not Red Hat (or SUSE for that matter.)

There are many large organizations that pay for RHEL support. Supercomputers, for example. These organizations also benefited from being able to spin up analog installs of CentOS on local machines for testing. Not anymore. I expect RHEL's market dominance in these areas to diminish over time.

HPC was always a tough sales area for Red Hat and RHEL.

In general, while RHEL is obviously still an important revenue source, there's also a lot of focus on OpenShift going forward which has done of pretty good job of covering (and more) inevitable RHEL declines moving forward.

All the HPC I've used in the past was always RHEL... I wouldn't have imagined it was a tough sales area for RedHat, at least in the past.

For testing environments Red Hat will literally give them free RHEL. Problem solved.

No, they won't. I'm talking about the users of HPC centers, not the maintainers. The supercomputer cluster is at NASA or DoE and running RHEL, but the user is some grad student in Caltech or whatever. The grad student needs the analog environment to run their code before their scheduled time on the big iron.