almalinux vs rockylinux

gapper

hi guys im planning my update from centos 6 to v8 so im considering almalinux and rockylinux

which one is more accepted in the hosting industry?

varwww

Debian thx

Shakib

So far i did more AlmaLinux installations than Rocky Linux for our clients. Like a lot more.

Hayashima

Ubuntu.best

LTniger

Alma. Most of enterprise choose it.

webcraft

Rocky has been rock stable for me so far. Actually, I don't see a big difference between those two than another logo.

ezeth

Alma, but I've been using centos stream and rhel where extended support is needed for most of my customerts.

RHEL is now free for dev teams, and it's even free in production for up to 16 systems.

ns110621

I use Rocky Linux. AlmaLinux was developed by CloudLinux, Inc. and is still greatly influenced by it, so it may have the same ending as CentOS later.

ezeth

@ns110621 said:
so it may have the same ending as CentOS later.

Berry = Almalinux
Rock = Centos

He switched? Pull the funding

But seriously though. I am always worried when switching to centos alternatives that funding will be pulled and migrating back to centos will be impossible

zhi

debian or ubuntu

Boogeyman

Almalinux is backed by Cloudlinux(Read cPanel). I have previously posted a discussions related this which went horribly wrong. If you hate cPanel, RockyLinux is the way to go.

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/174421/orange-colored-almalinux-logo#latest

@ezeth said: RHEL is now free for dev teams, and it's even free in production for up to 16 systems.

Those are dev licenses though with no support and you don't know if they will have a mood swing sooner or later.

xethost

Alma

b0lt

The former is backed by a company, so more people would lean toward that. I do have some faith in the name of community effort Rocky though.

Fritz

AlmaLinux for my DA and Red Hat 8 for my Plesk.

imok

CentOS is still the best OS in the world.

If you don't want to use it, then Almalinux should be your best choice.

No Debian thx.

frog

@b0lt said:
The former is backed by a company, so more people would lean toward that. I do have some faith in the name of community effort Rocky though.

Alma Linux is a community-owned company and backed by a company (CloudLinux).
Rocky Linux is a company owned by one person.

jonathanspw

@webcraft said: Rocky has been rock stable for me so far. Actually, I don't see a big difference between those two than another logo.

The actual OS's aren't really any different - they're both 1:1 compatible repacks of RHEL after all. The big difference is in the community structure behind each. AlmaLinux is an independent organization controlled by a foundation of the community which will be basically impossible for any person/company to control. It also has more corporate backing and contributors which means faster releases.

Rocky is solely owned and controlled by Greg Kurtzer and he can do whatever he pleases with it.

@ns110621 said: I use Rocky Linux. AlmaLinux was developed by CloudLinux, Inc. and is still greatly influenced by it, so it may have the same ending as CentOS later.

Yes and no. See above. Alma was founded/started by CloudLinux - yes. That's where the accuracy of your statement ends.

The control of Alma has been transferred now to the board of the independent foundation which was started (AlmaLinux OS Foundation). Igor stepped down as chair of the board as originally planned and "handed over the reigns".

CloudLinux is still a corporate sponsor (as are plenty of others, see the "Backed by" section of https://almalinux.org for some of the others) and some CL staff do contribute quite a bit to Alma still. We're still working to get some of the infrastructure split off (mainly the build system is what's left) but CL does not control Alma.

@ezeth said: But seriously though. I am always worried when switching to centos alternatives that funding will be pulled and migrating back to centos will be impossible

It's pretty easy to swap back and forth between RHEL distros. I wouldn't worry about this too much.

@Boogeyman said: Almalinux is backed by Cloudlinux(Read cPanel). I have previously posted a discussions related this which went horribly wrong. If you hate cPanel, RockyLinux is the way to go.

See above. This is pretty wrong. CloudLinux is a corporate sponsor of Alma and they contribute some development time but they do not control Alma in any way.

cPanel/WebPros does not control Alma either. Jesse Asklund from WebPros is a board member but he's only 1 of 5. AlmaLinux is a registered 501(c)6 non-profit and has a board elected by the members. If you don't like who is on the board or the direction of things become a member of the AlmaLinux Foundation (which is free) and get a vote!

https://almalinux.org/foundation/members/

@b0lt said: The former is backed by a company, so more people would lean toward that. I do have some faith in the name of community effort Rocky though.

Be careful how you perceive the PR spin being put on Rocky and "community". It's all owned by one person.

On the front page of https://almalinux.org:

An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution, focused on long-term stability, providing a robust production-grade platform. AlmaLinux OS is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL® and pre-Stream CentOS.

Every person involved in Alma believes in this model. There is no secret monetization plan, there is no hidden agenda - there are simply people who believe in what CentOS did for many years and want to carry on the great work while fixing a few things that were broken along the way (hence the proper non-profit foundation to own the assets, etc. to prevent what happened to CentOS from being possible again).

Feel free to join https://chat.almalinux.org/almalinux/channels/town-square for any questions/concerns. Alma is a very open and welcoming community

b0lt

@frog said:

@b0lt said:
The former is backed by a company, so more people would lean toward that. I do have some faith in the name of community effort Rocky though.

Alma Linux is a community-owned company and backed by a company (CloudLinux).
Rocky Linux is a company owned by one person.

and

@jonathanspw said:

@b0lt said: The former is backed by a company, so more people would lean toward that. I do have some faith in the name of community effort Rocky though.

Be careful how you perceive the PR spin being put on Rocky and "community". It's all owned by one person.

Huh I actually don't know that. Thanks for letting me know. That do change a lot of things. For some reasons I though Rocky is a community thing like the majority of Linux distros.

Chalipa

Which one of these two has the same command structure/usage as CentOS?

jonathanspw

@Chalipa said:
Which one of these two has the same command structure/usage as CentOS?

Both

Boogeyman

@jonathanspw said:

Lol. Rocky looks more of a community to me than Alma. Alma is just corporate community.

@jonathanspw said: cPanel/WebPros does not control Alma either. Jesse Asklund from WebPros is a board member but he's only 1 of 5. AlmaLinux is a registered 501(c)6 non-profit and has a board elected by the members. If you don't like who is on the board or the direction of things become a member of the AlmaLinux Foundation (which is free) and get a vote!

benny is also from cPanel.

BTW both of these are backed by corporate bodies of their own. Gregory is related to CIQ and Alma is backed by cPanel, CL. Both of them can pull funding whenever they wish. It's just that Alma is better with marketing. Otherwise at this moment Rocky is more of a community approach than Alma.

There is no sponsorship information available on the main website of Alma but Rocky is backed by some big names.

https://rockylinux.org/partners/
https://rockylinux.org/sponsors/

More corporate bodies would want Alma to become the successor of CentOS because they loved that orange thing all those years.

Who cares. If no one wishes to give me fresh ISO every six months I will grab RHEL sources. Debrand necessary packages and pack my RHEL image. Overtime with some automation it will get easier for me. Debian/Ubuntu/anything works for me. At least if I need I will make it work.

Boogeyman

Every business just wants to make sure that they eliminate all the opponents on that same niche. The fact is who does it better.

jonathanspw

@Boogeyman said: Lol. Rocky looks more of a community to me than Alma. Alma is just corporate community.

Care to clarify? AlmaLinux is a freestanding non-profit foundation. Sure there are corporate donors but that's how it works with plenty of non-profits - and guess what, the corporate donors don't own them either.

@Boogeyman said: benny is also from cPanel.

was.

@Boogeyman said: BTW both of these are backed by corporate bodies of their own. Gregory is related to CIQ and Alma is backed by cPanel, CL. Both of them can pull funding whenever they wish. It's just that Alma is better with marketing. Otherwise at this moment Rocky is more of a community approach than Alma.

Just because CL and cPanel are corporate sponsors doesn't mean they run Alma.

@Boogeyman said: There is no sponsorship information available on the main website of Alma but Rocky is backed by some big names.

Dude it's literally on the front page. I made some highlights to help you find it. https://imgur.com/a/MUqh2uo

@Boogeyman said: More corporate bodies would want Alma to become the successor of CentOS because they loved that orange thing all those years.

Not sure why you still think Alma has any relation to cPanel/WebPros. I've already clarified that.

@Boogeyman said: Who cares. If no one wishes to give me fresh ISO every six months I will grab RHEL sources. Debrand necessary packages and pack my RHEL image. Overtime with some automation it will get easier for me. Debian/Ubuntu/anything works for me. At least if I need I will make it work.

The more the merrier

Boogeyman

@jonathanspw said: Care to clarify? AlmaLinux is a freestanding non-profit foundation. Sure there are corporate donors but that's how it works with plenty of non-profits - and guess what, the corporate donors don't own them either.

Their forum and other things. Only legal structure doesn't make things free as freedom. Linux is also trademarked by Linus.

@jonathanspw said: was.

I know that. But there is still cPanel fragrance everywhere.

@jonathanspw said: Just because CL and cPanel are corporate sponsors doesn't mean they run Alma.

I will tell some secret stories here if you push me further!

@jonathanspw said: Dude it's literally on the front page. I made some highlights to help you find it. https://imgur.com/a/MUqh2uo

For some reason it loads slow and I skipped.

@jonathanspw said: Not sure why you still think Alma has any relation to cPanel/WebPros. I've already clarified that.

Old habits die hard.

@jonathanspw said: The more the merrier

For consumer, but for business that's a mess.

One thing is for sure they both can go under the rock whenever they want. The question is who will pick the batton and take the race ahead. Just choose anything you like. RHEL systems can easily be converted to another OS. You can build package from source if it's not there. The process is not that complicated.

Boogeyman

Do Alma have things like this?
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/Projects/Secure_Boot
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/koji-tagging-strategy
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/release-cycle
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/sop-sig-content
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/development/Build_Order/Build_Pass_1_Successful
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/development/debranding/how-to

I got to know more about RHEL packaging from these guides. Alma doesn't cover any of these.

Just compare the debranding article.

https://wiki.almalinux.org/development/Packaging.html#upstream-packages-modification

https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/development/debranding/Debrand_Package_List

This is way more open. Alma only have few articles that is pretty useless to me.

And none of those .alma package is in Github. I found none. As we speak there is only 28 repository in Github and these are not debranded package.

And here is Rocky Linux gitlab enterprise with all debranded packages.
https://git.rockylinux.org/explore

Alma also have https://git.almalinux.org/explore/repos but in their docs they referred that all packages would be uploaded in Github.

sparek

I've never been a huge fan of CloudLinux. They've done a great marketing job because they have just about every web hosting company out there believing that they have to use CloudLinux for their servers. But I just don't think a lot of what CloudLinux offers really works or people are just as well off with vanilla CentOS.

The limit system that CloudLinux offers is a great idea... it just doesn't work. You have to set your minimum limits so high that there's no reason for any account to ever upgrade their limits.

I guess you can't really fault CloudLinux for doing such a good job at marketing themselves. Maybe the issue is that users just don't understand how little these imposed limits are really helping. Or is CloudLinux taking advantage of these users?

I also have to wonder if AlmaLinux will follow the same path. What if they start tying "features" to CloudLinux in such a way that a vanilla AlmaLinux is useless?

Probably the most shocked that Ubuntu or Debian didn't take the CentOS 8 announcement and use it as an opportunity to (better) get into the server market.

I'm still taking a waiting game on all of this. Right now it looks like the masses are choosing AlmaLinux. Whether that's a good decision or not is debateable, but you don't want to be stuck as the only one using a CentOS alternative. So if push comes to shove, I'll probably go AlmaLinux. But I'd really prefer if a non CloudLinux backed alternative took over.

AlwaysSkint

^ This, except we don't need a bloated desktop distro as the basis for a server (Ubuntu). The key to a good server is secure stability not feature creep. Ref. snap, flatpak et al. Eat raw meat Debian.
I never bought into the whole C8 thing (Stream, WTF?) anyway and a proper successor to C7 is all that's required. If it ends up being Alma or Rocky by default, then fine: the important criteria should be stability, not bleeding edge.

[P.S. Why the hell do so many 'server' distros have wireless drivers anywhere near them? (Semi-rhetorical.)]

jonathanspw

@Boogeyman said: Do Alma have things like this?

https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/Projects/Secure_Boot
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/koji-tagging-strategy
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/release-cycle
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/release-engineering/sop-sig-content
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/development/Build_Order/Build_Pass_1_Successful
https://wiki.rockylinux.org/en/team/development/debranding/how-to

Some of the docs are still a work in progress. As I've already mentioned one of the last pieces left at CL is the build system which is nearly split out to its own. This single URL covers a lot of the links you provided: https://wiki.almalinux.org/Transparency.html#assets-and-build-environment

@Boogeyman said: And none of those .alma package is in Github. I found none. As we speak there is only 28 repository in Github and these are not debranded package.

https://git.almalinux.org/explore/repos

Not sure why you're so full of hate for Alma.

@sparek said: I also have to wonder if AlmaLinux will follow the same path. What if they start tying "features" to CloudLinux in such a way that a vanilla AlmaLinux is useless?

AlmaLinux != CloudLinux. There's no overlap in the two OSs except that they're both built from RHEL sources.

sparek

@jonathanspw said:
AlmaLinux != CloudLinux. There's no overlap in the two OSs except that they're both built from RHEL sources.

You could be right. But it's just going to be hard to get rid of that perception.

And nobody really knows what the future holds. 5 years from now they could decide to merge the two projects into a single entity, that requires a license, and then we're all back into threads here on LET asking what the best successor to AlmaLinux is.

The industry is going to dictate where all of this goes. Anybody that can remember when RedHat became RedHat Enterprise Linux will recall the months (years?) of trying to find a free OS successor. Eventually CentOS became that successor.

No doubt that AlmaLinux is in the lead right now, but will it maintain that lead?

@AlwaysSkint said:
except we don't need a bloated desktop distro as the basis for a server (Ubuntu).

That's definitely an issue with Ubuntu. And I'm not exactly sure where Debian fits into all of this. (In my mind, Ubuntu is still a branch of Debian, although apparently that branch fell off and grew roots some time ago)

But I do think there's a lot of things that Ubuntu (and Debian?) does better than RedHat based distros. I'm not saying Ubuntu is the answer to server environments, but just kind of surprised that Ubuntu didn't start working on a server or web hosting targeted OS (name it something different than Ubuntu) when the CentOS 8 announcement was made. That seemed to me to be a great opportunity to gain some market share in the server environment. And who knows, maybe they are working on something (although I have no reason to believe that they are). That's one reason why I'm a bit reluctant to jump on the AlmaLinux right now. I'm content to stick to CentOS 7 right now while I wait and see how things play out.

AlwaysSkint

@sparek said: I'm content to stick to CentOS 7 right now..

I have about 15 C7 instances, plus a few Debian for good measure (depends on the control panel in use, plus the applications that run upon them.)
I spun up an Alma just a few days ago, to check if CWP installed OK. Notwithstanding some small gotchas (typical CWP bugs), it went well enough. I should really wipe it and try Rocky for comparison.

bruh21

oracle