Tbh I do not know the ins and outs of rhel based distros, so these have caught my interest. I’ve tries live usb of both and I really did like the feel of alma. Rocky I thought felt like every other GNOME system… But I clearly dont really know much about these sort of distros and their capabilities. Are these considered enterprise grade? I have no clue. Would love to hear your thoughts on alma and Rocky and what makes them different that other distros. Thanks
What about just running the good and stable Debian and ignore anything else that might be half proprietary or turn to be abandonware sometime in the future. Most arguments against using Debian are just lies and lack of knowledge, if you want real stability and long term support go with Debian. Also, most likely 99.99% of the people that used CentOS can run everything they need on Debian with zero issues.
But oh well this CentOS / RedHat mess just proved what I know for a long time: people deserve what the had. Why you may ask? Because right on the that mess a large percentage of people migrated from CentOS to Ubuntu Server replacing one problem with another. When are people going to learn NOT TO use questionable open-source?
I was running debian bookworm but was having issues with random Freezing And loss of touchpad and keyboard and also was having issues with my WiFi firmware or drivers idk. I mean I liked debian, but I couldn’t fix the problems so I aborted
Interesting… I’ve been using it mostly on HP laptops and everything has been working out of the box perfectly since ever. Even the custom keys and stuff.
Man my actual technical expertise is sorta limited, so it could have been user error too. I try to follow guides or tutorials, other times if it seems simple enough, I wing it lol
I don’t see much point to enterprise distros unless you have a specific reason to use one, i.e. specific business or server applications. So unless you need it for that, you’re better off with a desktop Linux - Fedora if you want to stick with rhel’s sphere, Debian if you want super stable.
Thanks, thats pretty much what I was thinking. Trying to explore other areas of linux lol
I am building a homelab for during college (4 years) and I don’t really feel like doing a release upgrade (ie: debian 11 to 12) in the middle of schooling or over a break when i wanna relax and just chill. Debian offers 2 years of support official, and like 4 extended (unluckily, the times didn’t align so if I picked debian I would have to upgrade during college),and Rocky/alma offer 4 years official and like 8 extended.
I might be wrong (on phone rn), I recommend checking https://endoflife.date
Big difference, big enough that this factor is the singular reason companies go with them. Not having to do release upgrades as frequently means less maintenance, means less costly.
Debian 12 was just released. You are not going to need to upgrade it ( until June 2028 ).
Certainly though, being able to say in the same release for a long time is one of the primary reasons to use RHEL or its clones.
My goal was to install openstack on my server, using kolla-ansible, one of the automatic installers. It officially supported debian 11. I would have had to upgrade when the openstack packagers switched over to 12.
But it also officially supported Rocky Linux 9, which goes eol in like 7 years.
Up until very recently, both Alma and Rocky were meant to be bug-for-bug duplicates of RHEL. Other than branding, there should be no difference at all between the three.
So, as far as the software is concerned, they are enterprise grade. Support is may be another matter.
Recently, Red Hat made it more difficult to create exact copies of RHEL. Without getting into it, Rocky has figured out how to continue while Alma has decided to be ABI compatible but give up on being an exact big-for-bug copy.
I do not think either Alma or Rocky has had a release since the change so they should still be identical.
Thanks for this info; kinda seems bizarre to me lol
I use Alma Linux on one of my production servers. It’s very stable. Never used Rocky Linux, but I would guess it’s also similar i.e enterprise grade.
They were both created to replace CentOS, a free version of RHEL that Red Hat killed.
I’m not familiar with that world of linux, what sets rocky and alma aside from the rest of the distros
They are both supposed to be versions of a “free RHEL”. You’ll mostly find them used in the enterprise space where the big players are RHEL, OpenSuse Leap, Ubuntu, Oracle Linux etc.
Gotcha, I knew they were more enterprise oriented but wondering if there’s any benefit of using an enterprise oriented distro just as an individual lol its foreign to me
Only benefit you’ll get is rock solid stable support at the cost of new kernel and desktop features trickling in very slowly (This is how everything in enterprise in general moves).
I would recommend using a distro geared towards desktop use such as Fedora.
Thank you, I never quite knew the differences between enterprise oriented distros and just regular workstation or personal use distros
I moved everything over to Rocky from CentOS when RH moved to stream. I don’t run a GUI on my Rocky Linux servers but as a command line distribution it is working really well for me.
