AlmaLinux vs Rocky Linux

[Rainmaker]

I wasn't sure whether this would be better suited here, or in Enterprise/Servers.

How are we all getting on with migrating from CentOS? The two contenders are in a bit of flux at the moment, as the forked projects take wings and start to fly on their own. Assuming you decided to stay within RHEL family in prod, which are you moving to? Alma? Rocky? Oracle(lol)?

Alma was first to release, by quite a margin. CloudLinux's existing build infrastructure and experienced team made for an easy switch to dropping one extra community release on top of the existing commercial distro. They've pledged US$1M per year dev money by way of support/initial sponsorship, and have AWS and CPanel behind them as sponsors, amongst others. The foundation has been set up as a community owned non-profit. Releases are available for AMD64, AARCH64 and (unofficially) RasPi. Secure boot is supported and they have signed shims.

Rocky was rather later to release a prod-ready ISO, mainly due to time taken spinning up build infrastructure. They currently rely on AWS for this AFAIK. The founder was also an early co-founder of CentOS, albeit he passed on the project fairly quickly and it eventually was devoured into the RHEL family directly. Like Alma, they have some big name sponsors (AWS, Google Cloud). The foundation is a *for profit*/public benefit entity with community ownership, which (allegedly) makes it impossible for RHEL to gobble it up this time. They have AMD64 and AARCH64 releases, and a forum member has released an early unofficial Pi image and unofficial AMD64 live ISOs. They don't have signed secure boot shims yet.

For whatever reason, the majority of the community seems to have rallied behind Rocky. They have a much larger (5x) user base in their forum and on Reddit etc. Personally, I had migrated my prod servers to AlmaLinux, as they were (1) available first and (2) secure boot enabled. I also trust that CloudLinux will have the funds, the development team and the infrastructure to see through the next decade or more. I do have VMs with both, and as they're 1:1 RHEL (with some little quirks) I do have a soft spot for Rocky, but it's an ephemeral one - no real reason.

What about you lot? What did you choose, or where are you leaning (personally or professionally)? Do you see the two projects merging at some point? It'd make sense from a development and resources PoV, but I don't think their two legal statuses are compatible.

 

[Rainmaker]

No idea yet. But Rocky Linux seems the closest in spirit to Centos.

Or just use CentOS Stream.

I wouldn't want to shift upstream of RHEL for prod use. The only things concerning me about Rocky are lack of secure boot (for now), the leadership having previously sold 'it' (CentOS) out - which led to this position in the first place - and the for-profit nature of the foundation producing it. Time will tell, I suppose.

 

[Rainmaker]

I'm generally pushing customers towards AlmaLinux because: it was out of the gate first when I had many CentOS 6 installations to migrate from, it's from the team at CloudLinux who have been making a very good product for over 10 years now I believe, it took Rocky far too long for secure boot, the team behind Rocky seem to be stirring the pot of argument more so than Alma on the surface of things which puts me off a bit and I don't have the patience for more technical playground drama between competitors.

Yeah Rocky have been up and down. Greg (the founder) has suddenly changed his tune and has gone to media saying he 'gets it now' as to why RH did what they did with CentOS. All very corporate speak. I dunno what went on behind closed doors, but as you say Alma are just getting on with it. They have images for aarch64 and Pi, secure boot, all the essentials. No drama.

I have two units in prod running Alma and they haven't so much as blinked. I say 'in prod', I'm not a business but I do run public services; Tor relays, WireGuard VPN, and one of my servers in Finland is an AMD Epyc 10Gb WAN Signal proxy serving encrypted communications for people in (that I know of directly) Iran, Yemen, Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. People's lives depend on it, and that's not something you mess around with - it needs to be solid. So far, so good. I have mostly used Debian in the past and it's great, but a 10 year fire and forget base with solid enterprise underpinnings was appealing, and the change has worked well for me so far. It does use a fair bit more RAM than Debian though.