Out of curiosity: who is most used between AlmaLinux, RockyLinux and CentOS Stream?
Posted by sdns575@reddit | linuxadmin | View on Reddit | 110 comments
Hi,
Now, since 2020 those 3 distros got the CentOS place, I read about many using Alma, many Rocky and other CentOS Stream but after many years what is the most used?
From what I can see, Rocky seems more used, while I prefer AlmaLinux, I don't see many users that use it except Cern. About CentOS Stream, well it is prejudiced as rolling release while it is not but find some users searching for it.
There are data about their usage?
That would be interesting.
Thank you in advance
vectorx25@reddit
I still dont understand what the major diff between alma and rocky is, except for branding.
we've been migrating ec2s and physicals from cent7 > rocky 9, 10, and rocky been very stable, not a single issue so far
TURBOKAN@reddit
IIRC Rocky is bug-to-bug clone of RHEL while Alma provides additional fixes/patches
FarToe1@reddit
My recollections from the time as someone who got extremely involved from several angles to the point of obsession.
There was a lot of suspicion about Alma as it was backed by a commercial company, and with Redhat pulling the rug in the way they did, and Oracle trying to elbow their way into the party, Rocky being owned by itself and founded by one of the original Centos creators (and naming Rocky after the other creator) was seen as unbeatable bona fides. It was a free entity and seemed to be set up to have a solid always-free legal protection. Personally. I was extremely cautious about hitching our linux wagon to another corporate-controlled linux that could cause us as much work as Redhat did. We'd just completed the manual migration of around 130 vms from Centos 6 to 8 when the announcement came that the EOL had been shortened to 3 months instead of 4+ years.
Now some time has passed, I'm pleased that the scepticism about Alma was ill-founded, and they've done some excellent work and not shown any signs of Being Evil. Rocky went on to found a commercial company to sell support (although both distros are independent of these) and was met with a small amount of suspicion by some and removed some of the moral high ground it had through not being commercial. But the reality is that both commercial companies exist to offer enterprise support which helps to fund the free distros. It's a model that works and speaking personally, I was wrong to be sceptical of this.
Today, both Alma and Rocky co-exist in a friendly way. They took different stances when Redhat later changed the game again by removing free access to the source code and both ways seem to be working well for each distro. Alma are often slightly ahead in releasing point updates, and both communities are friendly and supportive. The actual product in both cases is very stable and the repos pretty solid.
I think we should all be grateful that both Alma and Rocky exist, and there's no huge reason to pick one over the other, imo.
(For completeness, my view with Centos Stream is that it is purely a testing upstream that's controlled by Redhat and they offer no support, nor even expectation, that the community will use it - stating clearly that it's not for production use. Even if they said it was, I'm not ready to trust redhat not to pull the rug again. As for Oracle Linux, I have no idea why anyone would choose it, either before Rocky 8's premature EOL or since.)
carlwgeorge@reddit
Both Alma and Rocky were started by CEOs who had business plans dependent on a RHEL clone existing. Both distros have always been primarily sponsored by those CEOs' respective companies. Both distros have dozens of additional corporate sponsors listed on their homepages, right under the literal words "Backed by". Being concerned about the corporate ties of one distro and not the other is absurd. Alma at least created a non-profit to transfer ownership to, something Rocky's founder said he would do and then didn't.
Rocky is not "owned by itself". It is owned by Greg Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ, their primary sponsor.
When CentOS was first starting out, Greg hosted them in his cAos foundation. He explicitly stated that he was "totally not interested in leading a total rebuild distribution". It was only many years later, while he was seeking VC funding for his company, that he started claiming to be the original CentOS founder. No one else from CentOS backs up his claim.
Nope, CentOS Stream is a general purpose distro in its own right.
That's true in that it's built by RHEL engineers as the major version branch of RHEL.
Totally false on the expectation, it's 100% expected that the community will use it.
Red Hat's definition of production includes their support. They didn't endorse CentOS Linux for production either. They also sell self-support RHEL, and guess what, that's also labeled as "not intended for production environments". If you're willing to discard Red Hat's advice that you need to buy their support for production environments, then also discard the part about CentOS Stream not being intended for production. It's a totally valid choice.
OkPresence1258@reddit
Regarding Greg,
The claim that he only recently began identifying as a CentOS founder isn’t accurate. There is documented evidence from long before CIQ or Rocky Linux existed. For example, in 2009 he publicly stated that he founded CentOS:
https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0911&L=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-USERS&D=0&P=130379
This predates any startup involvement by more than a decade and does contradict the claim that he invented the founder narrative only when seeking VC funding.
You can even find on CentOS own blog a post titled:
"Greg Kurtzer: Founder of the CentOS project" dated 2019
https://blog.centos.org/2019/03/greg-kurtzer-centos-founder/
u/carlwgeorge you were there as a part of the CentOS project, if Greg was evil and deceiving and did not found the project how did this happen CentOS itself called him founder?
carlwgeorge@reddit
I had never seen that post before. While it seems I was incorrect about exactly when the claims started, that still doesn't make them true. He did start pushing the claim much more prominently when he was preparing to launch CIQ and seek VC funding, so there is a correlation there regardless.
That blog post is a result of Greg tricking the community manager into repeating his claims. The community manager was doing interviews for the CentOS 15 year anniversary, and the first one he did was with Greg. Greg told him he was the founder, and the community manager believed him. After the post was published, the community manager interviewed other people who actually created CentOS, and they were not happy with Greg's claims. Had the interviews happened in a different order, this post would not exist.
King_4548@reddit
Did Greg fuck your wife or daughter or something? You have been crying about him for YEARS!
pnutjam@reddit
OpenSuse is where I landed.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> There was a lot of suspicion about Alma as it was backed by a commercial company
That's crazy pants, because The AlmaLinux OS Foundation is 501(c)(6) non-profit organization
https://wiki.almalinux.org/Transparency.html
...while RESF is literally a standard for-profit organization owned solely by Gregory Kurtzer:
https://www.resf.org/faq/gregory-kurtzer-owner
FarToe1@reddit
Alma was founded and sponsored by Cloudlinux, a commercial company. Rocky wasn't - initially - linked to any commercial company, although CIQ came later.
What I'm trying to put across, perhaps poorly, is that a lot of people, including those at my company, felt very betrayed by the early cancellation of Centos Linux 8 and did not want to move to another distribution controlled by a corporate entity that could kill it for business reasons. In those early days, Rocky appeared to be the less legally corporate entity.
carlwgeorge@reddit
CIQ did not come later, they're literally listed as the "founding sponsor" of Rocky.
sdns575@reddit (OP)
This. I can't understand where users take this info....
jonspw@reddit
At AlmaLinux we publish metrics publicly.
https://jonathanspw.com/almalinux-countme/2025-11-09/2025-11-09-almalinux_baseos_systems-timeseries-line-variant.png
This is only representative of systems hitting our public mirrorlist. There are many millions of systems that don't hit public mirrors. Large orgs tend to keep things wholly internal.
You can poke around the directory structure to see various breakdowns of the metrics.
Sad-Project-672@reddit
wtf is Alma Linux. I’ve been using Linux for twenty years. Gentoo, Slackware, fedora, Debian, Ubuntu. Alma might as well be arch with socks and anime wallpapers for all I know
jonspw@reddit
Surely you've also heard of Google in all your experience?
ebbex@reddit
If you're deploying to ageing physical hardware (12th gen dell and such), you might want to stick with Alma. They've enabled support for older raid controllers, and the x86_64_v2 cpu debacle for EL10. It's their biggest selling point for me these days.
In the early days of alma/rocky I had two boxes running centos8 that I in-place upgraded to one of each. Alma went smooth, while the rocky was left in a horrible broken state due to flaky repository uptime. And looking at their own metrics, they'd had spotty availability on repo and mirrors for almost a week.
I was actually pretty set on going with rocky, but that shit experience was enough for me to go alma. And I'm glad I did, alma has been consistently faster with releases (and also betas for E10) after a new GA from redhat, with rocky at times lagging 2-3 months behind.
TerrificVixen5693@reddit
I prefer Alma.
aaronryder773@reddit
Fedora and Alma Linux.
TruckeeAviator91@reddit
Alma here
MyDisqussion@reddit
If asked, I’d recommend CentOS Stream. Rather than use a distro that tries to generally emulate RHEL, the current CentOS stream will become RHEL 9.8 and 10.2.
Mazz7@reddit
People stay away from rolling releases for stability and control
nut-sack@reddit
Exactly, and that’s what all the hub bub was about. Stream is upstream of rhel. Whereas rocky and Alma are rebuilds.
carlwgeorge@reddit
Being upstream doesn't make it bad or unstable. Besides, it's only barely upstream of RHEL. It's the major version branch of RHEL, so it looks and acts like RHEL. Unless you're going over individual package changes with a fine tooth comb, you're unlikely to notice a difference.
https://carlwgeorge.fedorapeople.org/diagrams/el10.png
nut-sack@reddit
It doesn’t necessarily make it bad or unstable, but by getting it first, it implies less stability than running a rebuild.
carlwgeorge@reddit
It's doesn't imply that, that's just an assumption you're making. Updates in CentOS must follow the RHEL compatibility rules that define its stability. They're only published to CentOS repos after they have passed QA testing. The main difference is that in RHEL most updates are deferred and batched up into new minor versions, where as in CentOS they are released once they're ready.
nut-sack@reddit
That knife cuts both ways my friend. You’re assuming no bugs will be caught in stream before they get released in the RHEL point release.
carlwgeorge@reddit
And do you know what happens when a bug is caught after it gets into RHEL? It's usually fixed in CentOS in a matter of days or weeks to stage it for the next RHEL minor release, but then RHEL doesn't get it for ~6 months. If your defining criteria for stability is "less bugs", then CentOS is more stable than RHEL, because it has more bug fixes.
nut-sack@reddit
Right, because the patch can also contain bugs. Its not like in the history of fixes that one that didnt completely solve the problem never made it out the door. We would also find that in stream first.
carlwgeorge@reddit
If you found it. RHEL has plenty of bugs that went through CentOS and weren't recognized or fixed. And just last week I found (and reported) a bug that only affected RHEL and didn't affect CentOS at all.
It's time for you to give up this uninformed attempt at trashing CentOS. Both CentOS and RHEL are extremely stable, because RHEL gets its stability from CentOS.
nut-sack@reddit
you're missing the point. Its time for you to stop playing word games to avoid admitting the truth.
Ah, that makes sense, both of you work at redhat.
carlwgeorge@reddit
That figures, you're tired from all your goal post moving, and are realizing you have no real factual rebuttal, so it's time to resort to ad hominem attacks.
nut-sack@reddit
no one attacked you. You're wrong but refuse to admit it. But it makes sense, you're new at redhat. The koolaid is still working in full effect.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> by getting it first, it implies less stability
Yes, that's why RHEL offered users less stability than CentOS Linux in the past.
Does that statement make sense? Of course not. Getting fixes first does *not* imply less stability. That's just a weird rationalization that you hear on social media from people trying to justify their feelings about CentOS Stream. It's FUD.
nut-sack@reddit
Are you arguing for the sake of arguing or do your work for redhat? Because if a single bug is ever found in stream and fixed before it gets to RHEL, it would mean your statement is incorrect.
gordonmessmer@reddit
Lots of types of bugs are found in RHEL (and also Stream, since they're mostly the same components) and fixed in Stream first.
That doesn't contradict my position... It means that Stream is often more reliable than RHEL.
You have to understand RHEL's model as a series of compromises. Some types of bugs are found and not fixed immediately, in order to support minor releases with 4-5 years of maintenance. Deferred bug fixes are bad, but they're largely necessary to support LTS minor releases, which are good.
Stream is the other way around... No delays for bug fixes, which is good for reliability, but no LTS minors in that model, which is... fine, really? Very few environments need them.
CentOS Linux was the worst model possible... delayed fixes AND no LTS minor releases. Just a deeply flawed model. I have no idea why people are clinging to it.
MyDisqussion@reddit
However. it is possible to get bugzillas in CentOS Stream that don't get fixed until the next RHEL point release.
carlwgeorge@reddit
Yup, faster bug resolution is an often overlooked benefit of CentOS Stream.
MyDisqussion@reddit
Exactly.
gordonmessmer@reddit
CentOS Stream is a major-version stable release, just like Alma, Rocky, Debian, Ubuntu LTS, etc.
carlwgeorge@reddit
CentOS Stream is not a rolling release.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> the current CentOS stream will become RHEL 9.8 and 10.2.
I think that statement would be more clear to people who don't use Steam and don't understand it, if you add one word:
"the current CentOS stream releases will become RHEL 9.8 and 10.2."
(Your original phrasing could imply there is just one "CentOS Stream" release that will feed both RHEL releases, which isn't accurate. I assume you understand how this works, but some people have odd ideas now.)
eman0821@reddit
CentOS is not meant to be used in a production environment. Facebook servers may use CentOS Stream but they have their own in-house Engineers that reversed engineere and modified it for their environment which is different. Far as which one, every company has their own requirements. Some companies use RHEL, while some may use Oracle, Debian or Ubuntu. There is no real standard really.
snark42@reddit
Why not? RHEL support is mostly useless way overpriced.
eman0821@reddit
It's mant for developer and test environments not production unless you have an engeering team like meta/Facebook that modifies the OS down to the kernel.
carlwgeorge@reddit
If you want to be pedantic, be correct. CentOS definitely exists, because that is the overall project. CentOS Stream is the current distro from the CentOS Project, and it's well suited for production and is used that way by many more orgs than just Meta. CentOS Linux was the legacy distro from the CentOS Project, which was fundamentally flawed because it couldn't fix bugs or accept contributions. People regularly use the shorthand CentOS to refer to "the distro from the CentOS Project", which used to be CentOS Linux, and now is CentOS Stream.
eman0821@reddit
It's deprecated. CentOS and CentOS Stream are two different things.
carlwgeorge@reddit
CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream are two different things. They're both under the CentOS Project, and are both commonly referred to as just "CentOS".
eman0821@reddit
Your beating a dead horse. The last version of CentOS was 8.5.1. No more support that's deprecated. CentOS Stream is a whole different project that's not a 1 to 1 RHEL. It's designed for development and test environments opposed to critical production environment hense it's rolling releases.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> CentOS Stream is a whole different project that's not a 1 to 1 RHEL
A lot of CentOS users never used RHEL, so they never realized this:
CentOS Linux wasn't a 1:1 substitute for RHEL, either.
Neither are Alma or Rocky.
RHEL is a minor-version stable release model. They diagram the lifecycle for RHEL 10, for example, here: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata#RHEL10_Planning_Guide
When you look at that diagram, you should notice that RHEL 10 isn't one release, it's a sequence of 11 minor-version releases, most of which are maintained for 4-5 years. The overlapping lifecycles ensure that customers are always supported, without any gaps, and they allow enterprise customers to continue receiving security updates while they test a new minor release before they deploy it.
CentOS Linux, Alma, Rocky... none of them provide that. All of them are cobbled-together approximations of a rolling-minor system.
CentOS Stream is the only related OS that does a major-version release model in a continuous, secure manner.
carlwgeorge@reddit
You're 100% wrong. CentOS Stream is not a different project. It's the same project, with the same board, and the same people working on it. I used to work on the CentOS release engineering team, and I built and released both CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream from the same infrastructure. CentOS Stream isn't really a different distro (although in official terms that's how the project refers to it), it's a different variant of the same distro. It's designed as the major version branch of RHEL, fully targeting production environments, and isn't a rolling release.
I'm not beating a dead horse, I'm providing accurate information. If you don't like it, stop spreading misinformation that needs correcting.
eman0821@reddit
You have no idea what you are talking about. CentOS was a 1 to 1 RHEL downstream. CentOS Stream is NOT. It's Upstream the equivalent to Fedora. Completely different projects. I'm going to assume you aren't a Sysadmin as every Linux sysadmin knows this.
carlwgeorge@reddit
Dude, I literally built both distros, and I'm still active in the project (the SAME project). I promise you I understand them better than you. The fact that you think CentOS Stream is "equivalent to Fedora" demonstrates your ignorance in this area.
eman0821@reddit
Sure you did. Anyone can make up stuff.
carlwgeorge@reddit
How embarrassing for you.
gordonmessmer@reddit
https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/speaker/carl_george/
https://wiki.centos.org/CarlGeorge.html
There is a time to share and a time to listen. Carl is a Principal engineer at Red Hat, who has worked on CentOS and CentOS Stream. You don't need to explain CentOS to Carl. :)
posixUncompliant@reddit
So you're saying it's gotten better, then?
snark42@reddit
No, you just need the $100M Citadel contract with dedicated staff in office to get anything useful.
vogelke@reddit
Very nice.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> Facebook servers may use CentOS Stream but they have their own in-house Engineers that reversed engineere and modified it for their environment
I've heard that claim on social media before, but if you ask Meta engineers, they just tell you that they use CentOS Stream.
I run stuff on CentOS Stream, and it has been a drop-in replacement for the old CentOS process. And it's a lot more secure than CentOS Linux was, to boot.
eman0821@reddit
It's heavy modified. It's not stock as they make it their own OS. No one uses stock CentOS Stream on production servers to my knowledge.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> It's heavy modified. It's not stock
OK, who told you that? Because that's not generally what we hear from them.
> No one uses stock CentOS Stream on production servers to my knowledge.
Who do you know that uses it any other way?
eman0821@reddit
It's publicably available on the internet as they own the open compute compute project.
I work in cloud as I never seen a CentOS Stream in production environment. I managed RHEL from my previous role now I work with Debian and Ubuntu.
Dave_A480@reddit
You missed one - Oracle Linux
And that's where most folks who refused to pay for a RHEL sub went....
Hebrewhammer8d8@reddit
Is Oracle Linux support the same as RHEL support if you have issues?
Dave_A480@reddit
I don't know about paid support....
But the value proposition for former CentOS shops (who were relying on internal talent for support, not paying for a vendor) is identical to CentOS....
Also Oracle managing it is a positive for corporate environments who may not want to see future releases sidetracked by distro politicking....
Hotshot55@reddit
To some degree yes. Oracle support kinda just sucks ass, but RedHat support hasn't been the greatest lately either.
lightmatter501@reddit
CentOS Stream might actually take this by volume because it’s part of the CI infra for RHEL and Fedora.
ElNicaAdmin@reddit
I use oracle linux
pobrika@reddit
Oracle used dirty tactics which never sat right with me, so I don't use it, I also don't like the way you have to sign up (free) to download it.
I happened to be at the RedHat training center the week they announced the launch of their own distro, it caused quite a stir.
jz_train@reddit
Back when Redhat nixed centos as a viable free alternative to redhat, I began researching alternatives. It was probably a month or maybe two when I settled on Alma and started migrating servers. Mainly because it's was backed by CloudLinux. At the time Rocky seemed like bad choice. I've tested them both during that time. Rocky at the time did not support UEFI, alma did. I didn't need UEFI but Alma was ahead of the game. Maybe things have changed in the rocky space and maybe it's now the better alternitive. I honestly have not researched at all since alma works for my company needs and still install it to this day on servers. My decision at the time was based on a large company backing an OS and they already had a foothold in the redhat space.
Did I make the right choice? Who knows. It works though.
pobrika@reddit
I had just spent a month moving our cpanel systems to centos7 when they pulled the plug.
At that time cpanel said they would only support rhel7 or alma. So we ended up on alma 8. Since then we have debated all the Linux variants, on our team we all have different opinions. Trying to decide on gold images for wmware seem to cause anguish to everyone lol.
I'm against stream for many reasons. It's not a production OS being my main one, and they rug pulled I can't forgive.
Rocky seems ok and so are alma, there are also some other alternatives out there but you can't go wrong with either of the above. Or just pay up for RHEL of it's for a customer system.
Mazz7@reddit
Rocky bro
robvas@reddit
Generally regarded to be Rocky has the most users.
https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com
carlwgeorge@reddit
I would strongly recommend against drawing any conclusions from that site.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/1ozosge/out_of_curiosity_who_is_most_used_between/npf25zp/
GoatMasterUK@reddit
I think Alma achieved a FIPS security standard which is US? The Rocky achieved a higher level of FIPS and have tgone down the more enterprise route... I could be lying though, it's just what someone else told me and I've never really looked into it.. Where would you even start?
gordonmessmer@reddit
Neither Rocky Linux nor AlmaLinux offer FIPS validated components.
TuxCare offers FIPS validated components for paying customers using AlmaLinux, as far as I can tell.
RHEL offers FIPS validated components (obviously, I hope)
carlwgeorge@reddit
Yup, they're listed here.
https://access.redhat.com/compliance/fips
whetu@reddit
Hardly scientific, but probably the best independent numbers you'll find are here:
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
TL;DR: Alma.
That resource was not a factor in my selection of Alma. Actually, I don't remember why I chose it over Rocky, which really tells you how much it doesn't matter: The two are basically interchangeable.
What matters more to me is that these are both good options that are in the same family as RHEL and AL2023.
carlwgeorge@reddit
Hardly scientific is an understatement. Their own site explicitly says (in bold no less) that those ranks "correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions". Some fun examples of how disconnected these are from actual usage:
GamerLymx@reddit
I choose Alma Linux. I think they were available first and after red hat locked down the sources I think they handled the aftermath better.
FarToe1@reddit
Rocky was the first to get a stable product out after Centos Linux 8 was prematurely cancelled.
My recollections from the time as someone who got extremely involved from several angles to the point of obsession.
There was a lot of suspicion about Alma as it was backed by a commercial company, and with Redhat pulling the rug in the way they did, and Oracle trying to elbow their way into the party, Rocky being owned by itself and founded by one of the original Centos creators (and naming Rocky after the other creator) was seen as unbeatable bona fides. It was a free entity and seemed to be set up to have a solid always-free legal protection. Personally. I was extremely cautious about hitching our linux wagon to another corporate-controlled linux that could cause us as much work as Redhat did. We'd just completed the manual migration of around 130 vms from Centos 6 to 8 when the announcement came that the EOL had been shortened to 3 months instead of 4+ years.
Now some time has passed, I'm pleased that the scepticism about Alma was ill-founded, and they've done some excellent work and not shown any signs of Being Evil. Rocky went on to found a commercial company to sell support (although both distros are independent of these) and was met with a small amount of suspicion by some and removed some of the moral high ground it had through not being commercial. But the reality is that both commercial companies exist to offer enterprise support which helps to fund the free distros. It's a model that works and speaking personally, I was wrong to be sceptical of this.
Today, both Alma and Rocky co-exist in a friendly way. They took different stances when Redhat later changed the game again by removing free access to the source code and both ways seem to be working well for each distro. Alma are often slightly ahead in releasing point updates, and both communities are friendly and supportive. The actual product in both cases is very stable and the repos pretty solid.
I think we should all be grateful that both Alma and Rocky exist, and there's no huge reason to pick one over the other, imo.
(For completeness, my view with Centos Stream is that it is purely a testing upstream that's controlled by Redhat and they offer no support, nor even expectation, that the community will use it - stating clearly that it's not for production use. Even if they said it was, I'm not ready to trust redhat not to pull the rug again. As for Oracle Linux, I have no idea why anyone would choose it, either before Rocky 8's premature EOL or since.)
jonspw@reddit
No, Almalinux released months earlier.
FarToe1@reddit
You're right, I mis-remembered.
gordonmessmer@reddit
> who is most used
That depends... Are you looking for a count of the organizations that use each of them, or a count of the nodes that run within those organizations?
If you're counting by orgs, then I'm not aware of any useful data. There are some stats online regarding downloads, but those don't tell you anything about the organizations.
If you're counting by nodes, then CentOS Stream is almost certainly the largest, by far. Hyperscale users like Meta have enormous fleets of systems running CentOS Stream, which do not use public infrastructure and do not register in any download statistics. In fact, just in general, I would suggest that any non-trivial site is going to run a local mirror, so all of the statistics you see published that give you host counts only reflect small-scale sites.
But more importantly, the question should never really be "how many users" a distribution has, it's how the distribution will support *you*. If a distribution explicitly promises not to do any development of their own, it does not matter how many users they have, because they aren't going to help you fix an issue that affects your production systems.
If you find a bug that affects your systems and you need to work with the distribution to get a fix shipped, 2/3 of the distributions you've listed will work with you to get a bug merged, and the third one won't. In my opinion, that's not even an option I'd consider. The *point* of Free Software is participation and access, which they reject.
Speaking as an SRE: if you're making a decision about what to run, you *should* be asking about users experience reporting and resolving bugs in the system, not how many people are using the system.
sdns575@reddit (OP)
Hi Gordon and thank you for your answer. My is genuine curiosity, I'm on the Debian side today.
Madoc_Comadrin@reddit
My company is based in Europe.
We chose Rocky in 2021 when we upgraded from CentOS 7. No issues, have been happy with it.
Most our partners in university/research world seem to be using Alma.
EhImTooLazy@reddit
We said f it and went to Debian in 2021 from CentOS7. No regrets so far.
Fabl0s@reddit
Wish to see that happen more, former employer relied on Ubuntu, would have chosen Debian these days since we are not fans of the way canonical moved, current one so far is Debian only, and couldn't be happier.
FarToe1@reddit
We chose Rocky at the same time and run around 200 vms on it. Again, no issues with it.
spartacle@reddit
My company is global and we also choose Rocky outside of the US, where we've always ran Redhat
altmind@reddit
we still have most of machines on centos7 and 8. couple of new VMs are on alma 10stream.
carlwgeorge@reddit
There is a feature in dnf called countme that can facilitate unique system counts. In the last weekly reporting period CentOS Stream had 3.2 million unique system check in. For comparison, Alma uses the same dnf feature and reports just over 2 million unique systems in their last weekly reporting period. That's only systems checking into the respective public mirror systems, and doesn't count systems that update from private mirrors. As one example, Meta says they have a fleet of "millions" of CentOS Stream systems that update from their private mirror.
The data above is from the CentOS and Alma mirror systems. Fedora also collects countme data, including for the EPEL repository. I used to pay close attention to this data, until I was informed that Rocky uses donated cloud credits to spin up temporary cloud servers with EPEL enabled to beef up their numbers. This invalidates the data set for any honest comparisons, but doesn't stop CIQ from maintaining a stats page (linked in another comment in this thread) with graphs based on that manipulated data for marketing purposes. For those paying attention to Rocky/CIQ over the past five years, I doubt this will come as a surprise.
rdtbk@reddit
don't forget oracle
sudonem@reddit
I’d LIKE to forget Oracle
nativevlan@reddit
You mean the Litigation Law Firm that also happens to sell software on the side?
whetu@reddit
Hello, My name is Richard Hole. I am an Associate for the firm of Evil Oracle Lawyers Inc, which represents Oracle (tm).
It has recently come to my attention that you have expressed a desire to "forget Oracle". We forthwith request your participation in a license audit to ensure that you have the correct licenses, as provided by Oracle, that are required by state, federal and international laws, in order to "forget Oracle".
I look forward to your response
Kindest Regards
Dick Hole, Ass. EOL.
punishedbiscuits@reddit
gotta say, i chuckled. plz dont sue
wolfGhost23@reddit
The company ended up choosing RHEL 🐢
kolyo01@reddit
In my humble opinion, just pull the trigger on alma or rocky. Both are good. Anything specific you need, you'll do yourself anyway, so both options are solid. I think the biggest factor between the two is the OOB UX. See which one you like before it's gutted and bootleg hyperlanded, stick with it and don't look back :D
URPissingMeOff@reddit
I own and operate a small data center, about a hundred bare metal machines, no VMs. All Rocky all the time. More than half also run cPanel.
stopmyego@reddit
We use Alma.
doctor91@reddit
I work in public research and we exclusively use Alma (other than Debian and Ubuntu). Some private companies got on the Rocky train and probably won’t get out for a couple of years still.
supertostaempo@reddit
Alma
16c7x@reddit
I switched from CentOS to Ubuntu when the whole Redhat shenanigans took place.
FreeLogicGate@reddit
People used CentOS because it was RHEL. In that spirit, Alma or Rocky both work fine. Rocky is probably more in the spirit of what CentOS originally was, but for many, there's a significant question as to whether or not it's better to have a distro that adds in support for hardware that RHEL no longer supports, and tends to be updated more frequently, rather than something more akin to what CentosOS was a long time ago. There are also political and business related differences between the entities behind each distro, so I don't think # of installs is particularly important in comparison. Both are supported by significant entities with an investment, however one of those entities "owns" the distro and is a private "for profit" business.
anonpf@reddit
I e been on the Rocky train.
Systemctl_stop_life@reddit
Rocky just because it has some greater founding in my cto opinion
NotSnakePliskin@reddit
I've used all 3, first CentOS & dumped it when it went stream, then Alma, ended up on Rocky. Being that I'm not employed corporately any longer, I'm dumped all of them.
jokebreath@reddit
At my org we're using Rocky Linux 8/9 for anything that's not covered by our RHEL licenses. No particular reason we went with Rocky instead of Alma, it was basically a coin toss.
Benylin01@reddit
It's obviously depends on your needs, but RHEL with a free developer license is also a option to consider.