In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible
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”.