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
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.
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.
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.