Hey! it will be great to have a proper alternative for the companies that are on CentOS. I take that as good news!
Alma and Rocky have been around for a while already. Most people I know moved over to those after Centos went EOL. Not sure what Suse will do that these don’t already do.
Alma and Rocky depend on the publicly available source code for RHEL. Red Hat decided to close source except to paying customers. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
From the announcement: the will cooperate with Rocky and others to have a common rhel compatible fork
curious as to what they’d call it.
If they don’t call it Green Lizard Enterprise Linux I’ll be disappointed.
Am I the only one old enough to remember the 2006 deal between Microsoft and Novell? Now Red Hat is on the hot seat with everyone blaming and hating, I remember when Novell was in similar position in terms of community feeling betrayed.
There have been several acquisitions in the meantime, that’s true, but remembering the past helps not to be fooled again.
More choice is good.
Suse are a decent company (despite some history under different owners) with some excellent engineers who already support foss projects like Uyuni. I don’t know much about their new CEO but this might be a pivotal point in their history.
Redhat are proving themselves unpredictable, and that’s about the worst thing any company wants to work with. No good having a stable product if the organisation itself is erratic and makes bad decisions.
Why rhel/cent os is such a big deal? Cant ppl just use Debian / Ubuntu / alpine?
RHEL gets enterprise support from RedHat / IBM.
Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.
Switching is not always trivial.
I have a huge build that only works on EL7. It will take months of focused effort to unfuck that build code.
