@cadey Alma or Stream. Alma if you want something comparable to EL, Stream if you want something like EL but with slightly faster package updates.

Choose Alma over the other stable ELs because they're generally faster at updating when upstream releases. They also have some neat projects like ELevate. Stream's faster packages have also been quite useful at times, plus you also get access to Hyperscale SIG packages. (2)

I currently run a mix of Alma and Stream for our own needs.

1: https://wiki.almalinux.org/Comparison.html
2: https://sigs.centos.org/hyperscale/

@cadey I'm still running CentOS Stream on my laptop (although I got burned twice) and many Rocky hosts, but that was before https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/ ; I think it's a more promising approach than 1:1 compatibility, so I'm looking forward to what comes out of it- probably my next installs are going to me Alma...

@cadey
personally: something like Rocky, Alma, Oracle, CentOS

making choices in a Big Company: Oracle, [Rocky and Alma], CentOS

@cadey We've been using Alma for Floofy.tech's VMs (that aren't k8s nodes), but I accidently picked Rocky .-.

@cadey Alma or Rocky if I must.

For personal it's Fedora IoT (it's just immutable server) or CoreOS.

For work, I would I guess choose Alma if I can't use Alpine or just normal Fedora Server

@cadey wait people actually use Oracle?

@cadey i'd consider oracle linux if i was already running on oracle cloud but otherwise go with rocky linux, just bc it seems to have the largest community

@cadey At the university, people affected by the CentOS → Streams debacle seem to have split relatively evenly between Alma and Rocky. I can't trust CentOS Stream any more (it's clearly at the mercy of IBM) and I wouldn't touch Oracle with a 10 foot pole after Sun/Solaris/general licensing goo.

(Our CentOS replacement is mostly going to be Ubuntu LTS, but that's not a good general choice, it's just because we're already mostly Ubuntu.)

@cadey 100% Rocky Linux. Had some great experience with it.

@cadey I want another option 🫣

@cadey Oracle can't be trusted on keeping their policies. They have done some tricks in the past, like RedHat is doing now with CentOS. CentOS Stream does not offer long term stability anymore. So that leaves Alma and Rocky on equal footing. Both have the same liability of maybe not surviving 5 years. So for both it is the same gamble. Only by accident i was forced in the Rocky direction at the time of version 9.0. Alma failed to install at the moment i needed to replace a broken server fast.