AlmaLinux gives up being 1:1 RHEL compatible

mrbigmouth502, 9 months ago

2020 was such a shit year in computing. So many things got killed off. CentOS, Windows 7, Flash, and Python 2.x, off the top of my head, and probably some other things as well.

I mean yeah, most of these things were getting long in the tooth, but they were widely used and it would've been nice if they were all supported longer.

cinaed666, 10 months ago

Honestly, I feel the 1:1 compatibility issue is overrated.
We want a stable distro that has ABI compatibility throughout the 5-10year support cycle, I don't really care if it's 1:1 compatible with RHEL.
For the niche or specific usecases where RHEL compatibility is needed, they offer their UBI container.

In the past I did care more about it, because we were using specific Puppet modules and other provisioning tools that were validated against specific RHEL versions, but in the age of containerization it's much less of an issue.

It might be an issue with certain ISO compliance, because we can't just blindly throw a RHEL 8 CIS security benchmark script at a base Alma image anymore and expect everything to work fine. But it's not a dealbreaker in my sector. We can reach compliance by making up our own benchmarks. The sectors that don't have this luxury are probably already on RHEL for different reasons.

With what Rocky tried to do to remain 1:1 compatible with RHEL (Pretty much leaking and stealing the rpm sources) I'll stay with Alma, even if they are no longer "bug compatible".

hawdini, 10 months ago

I feel sorry for those small, understaffed, enterprises that had to scramble to get off CentOS 8, and may now be in the same situation with Alma/Rocky 8. IBM/Redhat have really fucked over potential customers. What a great advert to ensure no-one buys your product.

If IBM actually cared, they could have still gone down this route. But they could have let CentOS 8 run it's initial, promised, support cycle, then switch exclusively to CentOS stream. And continue to provide the source for the entire run of RHEL 9.

xylan, 10 months ago

To be fair, the transfer from Cebtos8 to Alma couldn't have been easier. Just ran a script to update the RPM sources and a dnf update and we were done.

Moving to a different distro with different package managers and filesystem layout is a whole other level of hurt.

hawdini, 10 months ago

That is true, however, some companies would still want weeks/months of testing the transition in non production environments first with detailed write ups and sign offs before any work can be done. The script may be easy, but the bureaucracy in some of these companies is also yet another level of hurt.

KalChoedan, 10 months ago

Just waiting for Rocky to make a similar announcement.

baronvonj, 10 months ago

They’re staying the course. tl;dr

One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered. We have validated this through OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers and it works exactly as expected.

Another method that we will leverage 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. This is the easiest for us to scale as we can do all of this through CI pipelines, spinning up cloud images to obtain the sources via DNF, and post to our Git repositories automatically.

mudamuda, 10 months ago

I don’t believe it will work. To do so it requires to maintain their own repository of RPM specs for a stable release distro. In this case Alma will became an active independent distro downstream to Fedora and CentOS Stream, and could steal the focus from RHEL. I don’t think RH will allow that. Not to say I requires significant effort and Alma is a small community funded project. It’s to good to be true and I have skepticism about the positive attitude of the blog post.

I guess RH tries to “embrace” Alma and Rocky as it was with CentOS.

xylan, 10 months ago

I don't think this will be viable for the people who really are looking for direct RHEL compatibility, but lots of people like me just use the basic structure of RHEL because we're familiar with the config locations and tooling, and we like the stability over time. If Alma can replicate that aspect then it's still good for me even if they're not bug for bug compatible. Rocky still seem to be going for 100% compatibility and I think that will be harder to maintain over time if RedHat actively fight it.

mudamuda, 10 months ago

I think RedH at will fight in any case. Independent alternatives are more dangerous for them than clones. If Alma becomes full-fledged downstream of Fedora it could offer features not presented in RHEL. They also can push those features through the Fedora upstream and it be useful for many people. It is like to have Debian as an alternative to Ubuntu LTS. But I don’t think RH will be glad as it can lead to forking RHEL off their own ecosystem. RH keeps control over the Fedora restricting them to seek independence funding. That why I don’t believe in such future of Alma but I’ll be glad if I’m wrong.