In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible
I don’t believe it will work. To do so it requires to maintain their own repository of RPM specs for a stable release distro. In this case Alma will became an active independent distro downstream to Fedora and CentOS Stream, and could steal the focus from RHEL. I don’t think RH will allow that. Not to say I requires significant effort and Alma is a small community funded project. It’s to good to be true and I have skepticism about the positive attitude of the blog post.
I guess RH tries to “embrace” Alma and Rocky as it was with CentOS.
I don’t think this will be viable for the people who really are looking for direct RHEL compatibility, but lots of people like me just use the basic structure of RHEL because we’re familiar with the config locations and tooling, and we like the stability over time. If Alma can replicate that aspect then it’s still good for me even if they’re not bug for bug compatible. Rocky still seem to be going for 100% compatibility and I think that will be harder to maintain over time if RedHat actively fight it.