I'm looking for a RHEL compatible Linux distro and these two seem to be the most popular options. I've done some reading on them and I'm struggling to decide between the two. I know AlmaLinux uses dnf which is a bonus as I'm used to it from Fedora but other than that I'm not sure. How would you go about deciding which to use? Bear in mind that once a choice has been made it would be inconvenient to change at a later date.
AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux?
- Thread starter Cromulent
- Start date
Soldato
We're in the midst of migrating many thousands of VMs from CentOS 7 to Rocky. Rocky has DNF too if that's a major worry.
Rocky is run by a private company, the same person as CentOS in fact, which could be a positive or a negative, whereas Alma is more 'open' as in it's a non-profit.
Rocky is run by a private company, the same person as CentOS in fact, which could be a positive or a negative, whereas Alma is more 'open' as in it's a non-profit.
You made your decision already, but you didn't consider the most important factor(s) imo. Rocky is 1:1 bug for bug compatible with RHEL, i.e. it's a clone. Alma is now only 'ABI compatible' with RHEL, meaning it bases from RHEL but can have other changes on top. That can be a good thing (they can add patches or security fixes either before RHEL, or that RHEL refuse to implement), or a bad thing (trusting their decisions and code, diverging from RHEL codebase), depending on your views and your needs. I found recently that Alma ended up running a different kernel than Rocky/RHEL and the two diverged.
Alma does tend to release much faster than Rocky, but not enough to care in a production environment. As above, Rocky is privately owned and Alma is more 'open', but in practice it shouldn't matter as both operate as FOSS. Both are active projects and both have their selling points. The repos differ slightly from each other and their respective SIGs have their own differing merits. In prod, I now exclusively use and prefer Rocky, but it was almost a coin toss. Short of FTSE100 type territory it's pretty irrelevant and both will do a decent job.
Regarding your comment about it being too difficult to change your mind later, however, that's not true. Both projects have excellent scripts that will live migrate machines in-prod with a simple reboot. I've switched in-prod machines from one to the other and back again without issue. It's basically just artwork, release naming and repo tweaks in
Alma does tend to release much faster than Rocky, but not enough to care in a production environment. As above, Rocky is privately owned and Alma is more 'open', but in practice it shouldn't matter as both operate as FOSS. Both are active projects and both have their selling points. The repos differ slightly from each other and their respective SIGs have their own differing merits. In prod, I now exclusively use and prefer Rocky, but it was almost a coin toss. Short of FTSE100 type territory it's pretty irrelevant and both will do a decent job.
Regarding your comment about it being too difficult to change your mind later, however, that's not true. Both projects have excellent scripts that will live migrate machines in-prod with a simple reboot. I've switched in-prod machines from one to the other and back again without issue. It's basically just artwork, release naming and repo tweaks in
/etc/yum/repos.d. So, bear in mind you're not lost if you decide later you should have picked the other distro (or one goes belly up).Thank you. Those are some interesting points. I can always spin up an Alma VM and see how it compares doing the same things.
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