[Updates 2022]: I still think the best option for RHEL boys out there

Intro

I've recently been keeping up with the news regarding CentOS and CentOS Stream and while being very disappointed by the news that CentOS Stream will take away from the stability of LTS by turning it into a rolling release distro - which coming from arch-based distros you would think I would like something like this.

I've come to realize that when a company such as RedHat (IBM) makes a change to it's latest products that it trickles down and affects the legacy products, for example: a company that relies on an older version of CentOS and don't have the resources right away to might grate to the latest version are left in the dust, and in this case older versions of CentOS cannot be updated because RedHat (IBM) took down the servers and mirrors that yum depends on, now you'll manually compile and manage your software/binaries. What's even more concerning is that this could impact people that rely on having an LTS distro because there is now a countdown to how long they will support the latest CentOS before it can no longer be supported and you'll be forced to move to Stream.

It's important to pay attention to things like this even if you're not a dev because it showcases how little large companies care about Open-Source or community efforts and why Linux distros should be worked on mostly as community projects funded by companies that support/use the them and "Enterprise"-Level Linux distros can be kept separate.

Good News

Rocky Linux is the hope that RHEL people need for future stability in applications and services. Gregory Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS is spearheading the project and is allowing people to contribute to this so it's actually a community effort, unlike how RedHat (IBM) pretends to give the community a voice with CentOS. I'd highly recommend reading more on the website about it as it's very interested and really great that Open-Source LTS RHEL won't be something left in the dust.

Other Thoughts

I hope that Rocky Linux takes off as it's an interesting project with passionate people behind it. As for myself, I'll most likely be moving towards Debian-based systems for larger server projects and for smaller ones maybe Gentoo or Arch :^)

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