Some people would set up servers with a DE, and use it to manage them.
In one of my past projects, I was working with a financial company and they’d use one of those VMWare with web inferface. We set up a Debian system; and because they didn’t know any better, have the default GNOME installed.
I remeber hating it so much, especially that they’re slow due to resource constraint. We were allocating 4 GB of RAM, which was all we could get due to being in early phase. You’d think 4 GB is enough for a server, but not when it’s running GNOME!
If it were up to me, I’d go headless. However, not everyone is into that, I guess. In hindsight, I’d probably install XFCE instead. KDE would be taking quite a bit of disk space, but it’d run surprisingly light.
Without the 1:1 compatibility, it makes me wonder if there’s much use case for this over CentOS Stream while it lasts.
Fixed that for you. IBM Hat is just bidding its time, doing damage control, waiting for their shills to become louder than their haters, then CentOS Stream will die.
I fail to see the use case for Centos stream full stop. I wouldn’t want a rolling distro in an enterprise environment and I wouldn’t want a an enterprise distro outside of a server setting. Sure you can run it on a home or personal server, you could also run Debian Sid, Arch, Gentoo, etc.
It’s not a rolling distro in the same sense of Arch etc., it has major versions the same as RHEL, the “rolling” part is only pertaining to what will appear in the next minor version of RHEL. So it can still be regarded and used as a feature-stable LTS distro, very similar to RHEL itself.
Pretty disingenuous to say that it’s ok because there’s major versions when both RHEL and Centos (historic) had fairly significant changes on minor versions and a major release might last 3-5 years before a newer version became/becomes available.
But you’re comparing it to Debian Sid and Arch. Packages in Stream are mature, tested and ready to go in to RHEL, and updates are very conservative. Can you honestly not tell the difference between that and Arch?
Trick is with these are those who need compatible products so they can match Red Hat systems run somewhere else. Test servers and so forth at colleges and the students who need to run tests back in their rooms but aren’t going to drop for RHEL.
I have mixed feelings about this, but before I pass any kind of judgement, I want to see what directions this goes in. I happen to really like AlmaLinux. I run it as the OS on my proxy server and it has been very reliable. I am more critical of this misguided marketing notion of “Enterprise Linux.” It has everyone in fear, most notably the PHB, of running Linux. If you have the in-house tools and expertise to run Linux, the whole “Enterprise Linux” FUD should not apply.
What the idiots in charge want is somebody to yell at if things don’t work and to throw their weight around. What they don’t know is that there is enough legalese in the terms of use to basically render Red Hat and IBM blameless. You know how difficult it is to sue a software company? It’s very hard.
My last job we had RHEL on most of our linux boxes (it was a predominantly Windows shop). In the 8 years I was there I made use of the RHEL support we had once, about a kernel issue, that I never got any resolution or workarounds for.
At the time I pushed to phase them out for CentOS boxes to save costs but mostly wasn’t listened to.
Yeah, I’d like to see where they want to go with it too. Looks like the primary motivation is “we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle”.
I’m running Alma at home right now, and I’ll probably continue to, if it’s RHEL-like but a little faster paced on updates. Rocky still maintains bug compatibility, so it’s still an option if you want that.
Hm, kinda nice on one hand, kinda not a proper solution on the other. Sounds like a lot more work for the same amount of people, not to mention this means lots of duplicate efforts for others like rocky linux, oracle and whatever hard fork SuSE is planning. I think they should at least pool efforts and resources. I mean I get not wanting to deal with Suse and oracle but you’re already downstream of a corporate shitshow.
If you want to run something like RHEL, you can run Stream and have a fine Linux distribution. Competitors to Red Hat could do the work of testing Stream releases and re-brand them as their own, and get a huge amount of development and testing work for free.
You are not entitled to a developer’s works. If they choose to have you pay for the binaries and include the source with full rights preserved for what you can do with that source, they are providing FLOSS. RHEL after this is still doing better work for the Linux / Libre software space than Ubuntu is by trying to push for vendor lock via snaps in my mind.
While I agree that nobody is entitled to the works of others, I find it both disingenuous and against the spirit of FOSS for Red Hat to lock its code behind a paywall just because it can still use the GPL due to some somewhat sneaky legal maneuvering so it can still call it “open source” by a very narrow technicality. At this point, why even bother? It’s all just so slimy.
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