CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox CentOS Connect, the FOSDEM-adjacent meetup, delivered a few notable updates: Firefox is returning as a native package on CentOS, an immutable Stream variant is being explored, and AlmaLinux is doing things its own way. Last year, The Reg FOSS desk talked to AlmaLinux project lead benny Vasquez about that project's internal …
All very interesting!
But isn't it a REAL problem that there are thousands (millions) of different "Linux Distributions" available?
No.....I'm not pitching for "a single distribution to solve all problems" -- say like the offering from Redmond, WA.
But....................................
I understand where you are coming from. When I first made the move to Linux over a decade ago the choice was bewildering and somewhat off-putting. A friend pushed me towards KDE Plasma but after a while I switched to Mint and haven't looked back since. It doesn't get in the way and just lets me get on with using the programs I need, which is what I want from an OS. Other folks mileage may vary.
Microsoft and Google are only too happy to provide RHEL-comaptible build and DNF repos for Edge and Chrome on Linux.
RHEL is really dropping client side usage hard. Looks to me like it's time to switch to AlmaLinux, because they aren't following RHEL down their self-desrutive rabbit-hole... Adding-back older driver support (still maintained in the kernel, but RHEL disabled so they don't have to support them), putting SPICE back in KVM/virt-manager, providing native builds of things RHEL is dropping, and even possibly keeping support for older CPUs a bit longer...
"and Bodhi packaging system. (I'm not sure if anyone at Red Hat knows or cares that there's been a distro called Bodhi Linux for some 15 years.)"
Our Bodhi is older than their Bodhi.
First commit to https://github.com/fedora-infra/bodhi was e26dacbb680bb65ffee0b82679e3f48a982ae4a1 was dated Jan 15 2007. The second was dated the next day and says "Initial import from CVS to Mercurial", so it wasn't even new then. I don't honestly remember when it was introduced.
The Wikipedia page for Bodhi Linux says its first release was on March 26, 2011. So our Bodhi has been around way longer.
(Also note this doesn't have much relevance to your "Red Hat people are arrogant" hobby horse - RH per se doesn't use Bodhi, Bodhi is specific to Fedora. For RHEL, RH has an entirely different thing called errata tool.)
Fair enough!
> your "Red Hat people are arrogant" hobby horse
That is just a symptom, not the real issue, though.
The real issue is corporate dogma -- RH is not a Linux vendor, and it doesn't compete with Linux vendors, it's an enterprise FOSS vendor and its competitors (in 2014) were EMC, VMware, Oracle, Microsoft, et al. I had already heard it from colleagues before I got to my NHO in Munich where it was officially laid out, complete with a little book about the Red Hat Way.
"The Reg FOSS desk is a former member of staff at the now-IBM-subsidiary and speaks from personal experience when he says that Red Hat's Linux folks can have a somewhat parochial view of the Linux distribution world."
Not an insider at all, but I experienced similar from the outside.
Eg. more than one Red Hat sales rep (and/or marketing type? not sure exactly what it did) visiting my employer a while ago was pretty openly dismissive of non-Red Hat offerings, like Debian, and essentially sneered at FreeBSD and even Solaris. I didn't actually bring it up but I imagine they wouldn't have cared for CentOS either.
I paid it little mind at the time, since we had to use all those OSes (and more besides), so it wasn't like we were going to displace a huge installed base for Red Hat back then. And those sales types' behavior was hardly unique among tech sales reps we encountered in other areas, e.g. Switchzilla, Virtzilla, etc.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
