this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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AlmaLinux is effectively a downstream of RHEL, so it inherits a lot of RHEL's pros and cons. I think, from a technical perspective, it makes a lot of sense for professional applications. It has a rock solid base OS that only changes rarely, which has lead to widespread support among professional (commercial) software. On top of that you get more regular updates to hardware support and (some) applications. You also get very long support times, which can make sense for some use cases.
On the hand, this model certainly also has its downsides. Towards the end of the life cycle, the packages get very old, especially the base OS (e.g. RHEL 7, which goes EOL this year, ships with gcc version 4.8). If you care about having the latest and greatest packages, this is not a distro for you. It's also not clear if Red Hat will try to further crack down on their downstream distros...
Overall, I think it's a good choice for a professional environment, where you don't need bleeding edge packages. Some commercial software also doesn't give you a lot of other options. For personal use, I'd probably look for another distro, unless you're looking for a very slow update cycle.
Nah, it's been upstream since RHEL locked down. Rocky's been doing some funky stuff though.
Good thing there's flatpak, snap, appimage, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. to keep you up to date. The question is then: do you mind if your DE and drivers don't change for years. And that's perfectly fine for a lot of people.
AlmaLinux mostly ships packages that are maintained by Red Hat for RHEL, which is why I called it effectively a downstream. But maybe we can just agree that they're related and it's complicated 😅
Yes, the situation has certainly improved, especially for GUI applications. But there's always some trade-offs involved with those alternative packaging options. The nice thing is that you can freely choose if you want such a very-LTS option, or something fresher :)
I can say apart from core programs like all of KDE (lol) and some CLI tools I use only Flatpaks now! Distrobox as workaround for RStudio and QGis, Appimage only as a last resort.
Sure, they're maintained by Red Hat, but for CentOS and not RHEL, therefore Alma is upstream. It's really not complicated.