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On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff).
Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?
Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases
Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?
So its actually for people trying to replace CentOS which RedHat decided to drop :)
Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?
The target audience is people who used to use Centos, before Red Hat ended Centos 8 years early and moved it to a rolling release schedule. Its primary competitors in the server-focused Red Hat derivatives are Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which is paid; Centos Stream, which is rolling release; or Alma Linux, which is, currently, basically the same distro due to how recent the Centos debacle was, but could diverge in the future.
Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases
They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.
ver Alm Rocky
8.4 8 34
8.5 3 6
8.6 2 6
9.0 9 58
One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole process streamlined and automated. The other started by loud release announcements, creating Slack groups and marketing materials, only then going for solving the technical stuff. I think I've made my choice pretty much right then and there.
Seeing how Rocky guys behaved towards the community (like their refusal to go to a popular Linux podcast unless the host was willing to forego any comparisons with other Linux distributions), and these release delays proved that.
What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?
You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.
Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?
It's a server distro (unlike Mint) in the Red Hat family (unlike Ubuntu). As a server-oriented distribution it has options for installing with a bare minimum of packages, including no GUI, and typically has longer support cycles. As a Red Hat derivative, it generally features more recent versions of core Linux userland things like systemd, since Red Hat employs a lot of the developers of those features. In comparison…
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 - and these can be significant! It's what draws me to the Fedora project so much. Asking as someone who wasn't really that bothered by CentOS Stream. I've seen it as basically rolling point releases, which wouldn't be a problem for me personally
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.