I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Why can't AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux drop their bug-for-bug compatibility commitment, and become stable distributions in their own right, based on CentOS Stream?

I think this ecosystem would gain a lot from these distributions having their own identity, instead of being just 1:1 copies of RHEL.

Change my mind. ;)

My conclusion was, essentially, that if I can't get our application to work with Fedora in a way that is practical, approachable, and sustainable for our "average" user it should likely be unsupported. I should also add I was working with at least one person who has a tremendous amount of experience with Fedora and they were taken aback by the whole experience as well. I should also note our application, specifically, (more of a long term support appliance) would likely represent an undue support burden because of the fairly rapid Fedora release cycle. As a random tangent, how is DNF /still/ so ridiculously slow? I don't get it.

Ubuntu/Debian is our main development platform so of course it "just works" there (in addition to various other Debian/Ubuntu derivates). However, when I repeated the same exercise for Arch (as one example) - a distro I have zero experience with - the process was completely painless and we had it implemented and documented in something like 30 minutes. Even though it is a rolling release the Arch wiki has substantially better documentation alone than anything I could find in the Fedora ecosystem (random hodgepodge blog posts for the last three major versions).

Again, I've been using Linux near-universally since 1997. I've had these debates (religious flamewars) plenty of times before and I have no interest in rehashing them. That said I don't know how anyone could debate my central point (let alone call it "absurd") - that Fedora is a testing ground for a stable LTS, commercially supported product (and one that with recent events is even more so). This is all right there, clear as day, in the official documentation[0]. So maybe not "absurd"?

I suppose I just don't understand the general preference for Fedora (other than momentum and familiarity) when there are plenty of other choices around where the primary goal is a free, stable, and open release.

On that note - IMO the best thing about open source is choice. Use whatever works for you, why would I care? I do not.

[0] - https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/fedora-and-r...

Did they shoot themselves in the foot? It was a lot easier selling RHEL licenses when people were running on-prem workloads. These days the support contract many enterprises want is from their cloud provider, not their OS vendor.

I'm not going to analyze if this is illegal or not (I don't think it is). It has been discussed elsewhere already.

But even if it where illegal, the only people in a position to sue would be the contributors of the upstream projects that get packaged into RHEL. And I don't see anyone having the appetite for that.

I contribute a lot to QEMU and there I'm practically working side-by-side with redhat devs. They contribute so much (maintainership, code review, testing infrastructure and much more), suing them wouldn't occur to me in the slightest.

Two thoughts:

> The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.

Doing so bug-for-bug requires more effort than it did a few weeks ago. And they're basically doing that work in parallel with Red Hat itself (duplication of effort).

Also, making a change like this (forcing Rocky and AlmaLinux to change in the middle of the 9.x release cycle), when the previous change (killing CentOS) was _also_ in the middle of the 8.x release cycle, with not even 24 hours warning... makes me feel this change was not _only_ made "to make CentOS and RHEL development better."

If that were the case, the changes would be announced with at _least_ weeks (if not months) of warning, so the community could plan for it instead of getting blind-sided... now twice in a row.