“independent” - Is it though?

Redhat are the major sponsors of Fedora, much as they sponsored Centos before taking it over and killing it in classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.

I have doubts about the future of the entire EL ecosphere - I know not many enterprise level organisations are investing deeply into it right now, whether that’s with RHEL or a rebuild. Too much doubt about Redhat’s intentions with RHEL and the future of it.

Have you checked syslog and apts logs?

Also, simply uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox shouldn’t lose all your settings. Silly question, but are you sure you’re the same local user? Also, Firefox syncs this stuff so all sounds odd.

A correct and helpful answer. HA is phenomenal, although some report the learning curve is steep - it’s totally worth it.

I use it with lots of different vendors and it consolidates and coordinates everything between everything else.

Can’t we have a new game instead please?

What actually red hat wants?

All the control and all of the money.

Besides that, I suspect they have no clear vision. And if they do, they are absolutely terrible at communicating that.

Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.

I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.

Your headline is sensationalist and inaccurate, and your description has only partial truths. You need to appreciate some history to understand that Rocky is not for profit and why. This isn’t anti-Alma, which was founded and is supported by Cloudlinux - a commercial company by the way - because that’s not actually important either.

Rocky Linux is owned by RESF which is owned by Greg Kurtzner, backed by a board of trustees. Greg, together with Jason “Rocky” McGaugh, created CentOS Linux back in 2004. Since then, Redhat “Embraced, extended and then extinguished” CentOS Linux through gaining legal ownership of the project and its name, and control of its board of trustees.

When Redhat (through control of CentOs’ board) finally pulled the rug (with very little notice) on CentOS 8 in 2020, Greg figured he could correct the organisational mistakes made with CentOs that allowed Redhat to kill it. He talks about that here In honour of Jason, who has since died, he named the new distro Rocky.

Rocky must be owned by a legal entity, and they chose a PBC - the reasoning is described very clearly on Rocky’s website here and it’s made clear that it is not for profit. It’s possibly that might change, sure, but somewhere along the line you have to look at the bigger picture and decide to trust a distro. I trust Rocky. I also trust Debian and OpenSuse. And, because they’ve also proved themselves honest and transparent ** despite being founded and sponsored by a commercial company** , I trust Alma. All are good choices. The beautiful part about all these good, open and free distributions is you can choose which you want to use, that you’re not locked into them and whether you want to contribute or not.

There /is/ a link to CiQ with Rocky via Greg, and CiQ is commercial, but Rocky itself is not, is definitely NOT for profit, and there’s no need to pay CiQ a bean if you don’t want to.

Anyone can pick holes in any distribution. They can take any part of the legal structure and present it to suit their own agenda, or misunderstand the whole.

I think that was the intention, but the reality is put all of the EL ecosphere at risk. I certainly wouldn’t be investing in RHEL and partnering with a company that makes such unpredictable actions.

I suspect the reality is that tomorrow will look much like today, however.

Not quite but it’s not black and white. Rocky is owned by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, but that is owned by Greg Kurtzner because a legal entity needs to be owned by /someone/ in law.

I personally trust him because I know a little of his story and his involvement with Centos before Rocky (ie, he cofounded it), but I appreciate that might not be enough for everyone. I’ve followed the project closely since its inception and am very happy with its progress and outlook so far, solely from a non-commercial aspect.

And Alma is NOT better. That’s like saying Cheese is better than Apples, or Titanium’s better than Lead. They’re different distros with quite different approaches. It’s fantastic both of them entered this market and both of them are doing well, choice is the absolute best thing about Foss.

(More detail about Rocky’s legal makeup here, if you’re interested) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Linux - I also have no commercial interest in it other than a user)

Yes, I’ve populated most of my local area, and every time I go for a walk or bike ride, I add as much detail that I can. I also find it very enjoyable and it’s pretty cool to see features I added show up in all kinds of mapping services that use its data

Osm now has the clearest and most detailed maps for walking that I know, and I use them in preference to the UK’s ordnance survey maps, which don’t scale so well on electronic devices.

Nice summary. One minor, but important, addition to your post:

much worse for Fedora, they have been culturally enslaved by Red Hat, 

Not just culturally - Redhat legally own Fedora too. Legally owning Centos was how Redhat managed to kill Centos Linux. One of the key things Greg wdid when creating Rocky two years ago was set the legal status so that Rocky could never be taken over in the way Centos was.

More choice is good.

Suse are a decent company (despite some history under different owners) with some excellent engineers who already support foss projects like Uyuni. I don’t know much about their new CEO but this might be a pivotal point in their history.

Redhat are proving themselves unpredictable, and that’s about the worst thing any company wants to work with. No good having a stable product if the organisation itself is erratic and makes bad decisions.

We’ve got over two hundred Rocky/Centos vms. all of them ‘pets’ that would require manual migration of lots of very different services, many of them bespoke. That’s quite a lot of work.

They announced something similar back in 2020 with a working title of “Liberty Linux”, so maybe that.

Excellent summary and conclusions.

Hahahahaha. Hahahahaha. <breathe> Hahahahaha.

Mate, it’s been running since RHEL announced the premature termination of Centos Linux 8, back in 2020.

Me too, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.

And they’ve not broken that, RHEL subscribers continue to get access to the source. It’s everyone else they’ve shafted.

Bitwarden’s great, and I use it myself. But for a company with groups, “secure” sharing and so on, it just doesn’t compete on the features. But even so, LP’s card is marked for us.