back to article 'Tis the season to test the RHEL and AlmaLinux 10 betas

AlmaLinux 10 is joining RHEL 10 in public beta testing, and the developers of CentOS Stream 10 have just hit the release button ahead of the festive break. As the holidays approach, so does a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. AlmaLinux 10 is now going into beta test. This version is codenamed Purple Lion. If you want a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "AlmaLinux's release notes are only about ten pages long. (This compares to a whopping 142 pages for the RHEL 10 beta release notes.)"

    That alone is a good reason to check out Alma instead of RHEL. :-)

    ""Extended hardware support" – in other words, the kit that AlmaLinux still supports that has been dropped from RHEL."

    For some folks, that might be the more important reason.

    Cheers to both outfits, either way.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      > That alone is a good reason to check out Alma instead of RHEL. :-)

      [...]

      > For some folks, that might be the more important reason.

      Quite, on both counts.

      Alma seems to be trying to play nice, follow the rules, and offer something genuinely better.

      Rocky seems to be trying to do whatever it takes to offer something as close to classic CentOS Linux as it possibly can: as close to actual RHEL as it can achieve.

  2. Korev Silver badge
    Coat

    Hopefully there's not a Rocky path forward the RHELatives...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    playing, nicely or otherwise

    > The real point is that Red Hat is not playing as nicely as it could with the wider Linux world.

    Shocking.

    My snark aside, cheers to Liam for teasing apart the schedules and release details and contents and versions among the players, to shine another light on the long-standing (growing?) problem of drift between Linux kernel, LTS, and distro packagers. This was a pretty digestible analysis, whether you entirely agree with all of it or not.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: playing, nicely or otherwise

      > cheers to Liam for teasing apart the schedules and release details and contents and versions among the players,

      I am really glad to hear it's useful.

      It is astonishingly hard to get useful current info out of any of the corporate players involved, so detective work and reconstruction is involved.

      However it's also really hard to get useful info out of some of the volunteer-led projects.

      There are all kinds of camps and sometimes-overlapping allegiances and many companies -- _especially_ but by no means only -- the American companies and orgs are (to this jaundiced cynical old Northern Englishman) *extremely* reluctant to speak plainly and openly. Indeed they are often shocked when I ask them to, and seem to consider it rude to even request it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: playing, nicely or otherwise

        Is it irony that the source is (supposed to be) open, but info about direction and plans and so on is (frequently) not?

  4. blu3b3rry

    Can't really disagree with Linus

    The whole V2/V3/v4 thing does seem particularly confusing.

    At lleast supporting v3 still means post-2013 kit. Oddly RHEL9 complains about the 2018 era NUC8i7 I run it on and claims "this hardware will be depreciated soon"....

  5. jake Silver badge

    During the meanwhile ...

    ... I'm awfully happy that I discovered Slackware threeish decades ago.

    The insanity of most other distributions boggles the mind. It's as if people actually enjoy making their lives difficult.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: During the meanwhile ...

      > The insanity of most other distributions boggles the mind.

      Yes and no. Mostly no.

      Slackware is just as mad as the rest in some ways. Tarballs? In 202x? WTF?

      And it is _huge_. When I wrote this:

      https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/20/slackware_turns_30/

      ... this allegedly-minimalist '90s-style distro filled my test root partition to over 99%. If it was Btrfs I think it would have self-destructed like openSUSE/Garuda/siduction with Snapper.

      I mean, come on, what do I get in return for sixteen bl**d gigs of stuff and not even snapshots and rollback?

      This is only not insane if you're used to it.

      They are all mad.

      If the industry were sane, we'd have migrated to Minix 3 or Plan 9, and later to Inferno.

      FOSS is meaningless if 1 human can't read the source code. All of it. That's what it's about. Not feeding it into LLM bots, or a team of 1000.

      The natural team size for programmers is 1. That's why we have all the bollocks like Agile, to try to herd the buggers in one direction.

      Having the source only makes sense if you can read it, understand it, and then change it. You, a single human mind.

      *I* don't want to. I did that early in my career and moved away with all possible speed. But some people like it and we need those folks.

      It's all mad, it's just all different flavours of "chuffing crazy".

      Would you like your delusions:

      * old fashioned?

      * vast beyond the dreams of Redmond?

      * all in one binary plus some inconveniences like a kernel?

      * so old it barely works?

      * crippled but all ideologically pure?

      * read only even to the admin?

      * in more layers of containers than a Lisp app has parentheses?

      * traditional even if that means only half working on ancient kit?

      * so secure your mouse and keyboard won't work?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

    I started out with retail (physical boxed) versions of Red Hat (5.2 actually) way back in 1999.

    Early Fedora Core versions were horrible, so I stayed on the last retail version (RH9) till Fedora Core 5.

    Today F41/XFCE is running on all the machines here at Linux Mansions.....

    ....where the RH dnf scripts are used every six months to get to the next Fedora version....

    ....and dnf is used (irregularly) to keep machines up to date.

    In twenty five years there have been RH releases which have been problematic and which I've skipped (RH7.1, F10, F14, F16, F25).

    My only beef with Red Hat involves purely personal choices. Namely that I hate GNOME (preferring XFCE) and I don't like BTRFS (prefering EXT4).

    Not bad for a "free" distribution provided with absolutely no support!!

    Now......about the actual kernel version....I don't care. See above!

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

      "Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?"

      People who run large numbers of servers I imagine. Some of them run proprietary applications. Some of the application vendors will only support a given version of a specific Linux distribution.

      And so it goes.

      1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

        Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

        And those "certified platforms" are rarely "current generation" hardware. They want a wider market than the latest and greatest for their wares. With the prices on leading edge CPUs and affiliated devices (NVMe4 is rather obsolete now, dontcha know...) what they are, and the performance of the previous generation hardware for all practical purposes, following Windows over the cliff of insanity just to appease Uncle Sam's marketing divisions is obscene.

        1. JamesTGrant Bronze badge

          Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

          Answer: People making a choice between RHELand something else. The RHEL10 Frankenkernel will diverge (immediately) from LTS and it will be very difficult/time consuming to determine the deltas between LTS and Franken6.11 - it’ll be a very very long list of fixes that all sound scary with no obvious counterpart in LTS. Which will mean:

          Money for RHEL - they just love fixing up old kernel versions - particularly if the fix is already available in other source code and needs porting and slightly modifying to fit the Frankenkernel, thus making it not exactly the same. Far too scary to migrate. Kerching

          Uncertainty for folk moving away from RHEL from a kernel feature/compatibility/security perspective, and more money for RH (IBM) (see previous!)

    2. Gene Cash Silver badge

      Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

      I started with Slackware, then moved to Red Hat in the pre-4.0 days. I still have a red hat I got with RH 4.0

      Anyway, I got tired of RPM dependency hell, and when I saw Debian apt could not only automatically download packages, but it could automatically figure out and install dependencies, I jumped ship so fast the Marines came over to look.

      Now I've been unable to have my camera, removable media, 3D printer, and scanner working with systemd, so I've moved to Devuan.

      So it looks like RH has caught up with the cool crowd a while back and can do automatic dependencies and updates now.

      1. Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck

        Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

        The differences between most major distributions are largely feature-complete with minor differences like whether file system journaling is enabled by default or not. With Ubuntu, apparently it's not. I'd call that a glaring omission in the modern age, but I do love the convenience of the distro, and the widespread support, which is at least as wide as RedHat's reach, just not for profit, much to the annoyance of IBM bean-counters. Same goes for those Fedora beta testers for RHEL.

        Haven't they heard of the Rules of Acquisition?

        I just love the fact that so many Americans love the Ferengi send-up of the stereotypical American CEO and Board! Welcome to the Ferengi States of America!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

          And workers rights are at the same level as those enjoyed by Bajoran prisoners working in the Cardassian mines.

        2. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

          Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

          > whether file system journaling is enabled by default or not. With Ubuntu, apparently it's not.

          Whoah, hang on, *what*?

          Of _course_ Ubuntu has a journalling FS. Ext4 is journalled as was ext3 two decades before it.

          If you enable ZFS you can have COW snapshots and things as well.

          > Haven't they heard of the Rules of Acquisition?

          Well, I can tell you that I haven't.

      2. amacater

        Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

        if you can't get systemd to work with your peripherals - did you raise a bug with Debian? If you didn't, the situation will never improve. [Disclaimer: Debian user for a long time here. DO raise bug reports and comments for any given distribution. If you don't, you've only yourself to blame when stuff doesn't get fixed for a long time because people aren't aware.]

      3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

        > So it looks like RH has caught up with the cool crowd a while back and can do automatic dependencies and updates now.

        Oh yes -- about 20y back.

        Now there is stuff like "Oh, Fedora doesn't support that because the firmware module is proprietary" or "oh, Fedora doesn't support that because we are a poor little community project and that would need us to pay and we can't afford it" or "no, we don't do that, because we are the upstream of a server distro and servers don't dual boot". (The last one I can't cite as it was a F2F conversation when I was an employee.)

    3. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

      > In twenty five years there have been RH releases which have been problematic and which I've skipped (RH7.1, F10, F14, F16, F25).

      Some would ask why you didn't simply move to something else without those problems first time, or at most, second time.

      I mean, they must have been bad or you wouldn't remember the numbers.

      Sounds a bit like Stockholm Syndrome to me, TBH.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Who Is This Discussion Aimed At?

        Liam:

        This comment of yours make NO sense!

        Suppose that F25 turns out to be problematic......just soldier on with F24 till F26 turns up!!

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

  7. scottro

    I've been playing with the RH10 beta and Alma's version on some VMs. It is Wayland only, and at present, only Gnome and possibly KDE are available. I suspect there are many who use RH at work and so will want a home workstation to get familiar with its quirks, but don't want a full DE. I've been able to build labwc, using mostly Fedora 40 srpms, wmenu and foot, a Wayland terminal. I've put in requests for labwc at EPEL, in the hope that when RHEL10 and clones come out, there will be at least one smaller WM version. When I mentioned this on Rocky Forums, one person responded, saying he hoped there would be a Mate version, so I'm guessing that there are a reasonable amount of people who hope for Gnome/KDE alternatives.

    Aside from that, most things work as expected There is an epel rpm, though you can't find it with dnf or subscription manager, you have to just download the epel rpm from dl.fedoraproject, and as there's no rpmfusion repo for it yet, I suspect a lot of media content may cause problems, till rpmfusion makes ffmpeg-nonfree, etc., for it.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Seems going well

    It seems like every thing is going very correctly and on point!

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