FOSDEM 2025 CentOS Join, the FOSDEM-adjacent meetup, delivered a number of notable updates: Firefox is returning as a local package deal on CentOS, an immutable Stream variant is being explored, and AlmaLinux is doing issues its personal manner.
Final 12 months, The Reg FOSS desk talked to AlmaLinux venture lead benny Vasquez about that venture’s internal upstream distro, AlmaLinux Kitten, and he or she advised that to search out out what’s new on this planet of the free Crimson Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-alikes, we should always attend CentOS Connect. This free occasion occurred over the 2 days instantly previous FOSDEM 2025, which suggests it overlapped the Open Supply Coverage Summit – we wrote about the 2023 edition of that occasion.
The occasion was strongly centered on the oldsters utilizing and sustaining CentOS Stream and its kin – or RHELatives as we prefer to name them – and there wasn’t an terrible lot right here for these within the wider Linux group, which is truthful sufficient, however there have been some attention-grabbing snippets of reports, equivalent to an immutable variant of CentOS Stream and the return of a natively packaged model of the Firefox net browser.
CentOS Linux is no more however CentOS Stream is alive and well. Meta is an enormous consumer and co-sponsored the Join occasion. If you happen to use Fb, Instagram, or WhatsApp, as an example, you are in all probability not directly utilizing Stream. Stream 10 was released in mid-December earlier than the RHEL 10 beta and intently adopted the AlmaLinux 10 beta.
The Reg FOSS desk is a former member of employees on the now-IBM-subsidiary and speaks from private expertise when he says that Crimson Hat’s Linux people can have a considerably parochial view of the Linux distribution world. From the lofty heights of its $34 billion valuation in 2018, everybody else within the Linux world seems very tiny down there on the bottom. We have discovered that some folks within the Crimson Hat-using world are remarkably unfamiliar with different distros, their construct and set up instruments such because the Koji build system, Kiwi image builder, and Bodhi packaging system. (I am unsure if anybody at Crimson Hat is aware of or cares that there is been a distro called Bodhi Linux for some 15 years.)
A few years in the past we spoke to the Rocky Linux group, who had been very happy with their then-quite-new cloud-based build system Peridot, which reproduces a number of the Crimson Hat construct system within the cloud. They had been very shocked to be instructed that SUSE and openSUSE have already got simply such a factor, the Open Build Service, and it may possibly construct packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and the RHELatives.
This broader dialogue about construct programs could have impressed the discuss on AlmaLinux: the special derivative, from that group’s engineering lead, Andrew Lukoshko. He defined how the group does not use Koji, Kiwi, and so forth, however has its own system that makes use of instruments equivalent to PULP for artifact storage and Pungi image builder.
Like SUSE Linux Enterprise, RHEL itself is comparatively tiny, with a small supported base of some thousand packages. As an illustration, if you need a desktop, it is GNOME or nothing. Because of this Canonical’s announcement that it will provide an entire decade of updates for the 60,000 packages in its universe repository brought on some pleasure. If you’d like the rest on CentOS, you should use the extra EPEL repositories, or set up issues utilizing Flatpak. As of 2023, this includes LibreOffice. There have been a number of talks about what is in EPEL, methods to package for EPEL, and so forth.
One factor you may want is an online browser. It is not trivial so as to add further repositories, or subsystems like Flatpak, if you do not have a browser to lookup how, and copy-and-paste the prolonged instructions concerned – see, for instance, this anguished comment and the next rationalization. We have famous that it is not easy to install a web browser on Xubuntu Minimal.
Thus the information that Firefox 128 ESR, the present long-term supported launch, was coming again to CentOS was met with applause. The browser may but even be joined by Thunderbird – however in all probability not the GNOME Evolution mail shopper as effectively. It should make customers’ lives a lot simpler if they will merely dnf set up firefox.
There have been a number of talks on the OKD project. Its GitHub page describes it thus:
In one of his talks, engineering supervisor Dennis Gilmore talked about an unfamiliar distro within the Crimson Hat household: CentOS Stream CoreOS. This is not out there as a separate, unbiased venture simply but, however it’s talked about on the CentOS Cloud page:
It has been about seven years since Red Hat bought CoreOS, after which it “sundown” its personal Project Atomic immutable distros. Aside from immutable variants of Fedora, there has not been quite a bit else to point out for the acquisition. OpenShift does contain Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, however you can’t get it separately.
It appears to us {that a} free, open, community-driven immutable model of CentOS Stream CoreOS might probably be of curiosity to a couple folks outdoors of OpenShift or OKD. We requested Gilmore if it was out there as a product in its personal proper, and he replied that it wasn’t, but when somebody in the neighborhood wished to make a standalone model, then there was no cause why it could not turn out to be so.
SUSE continues to be engaged on its immutable server distro, codenamed ALP, though we’ve not seen any information for some time. Canonical has been sustaining its Ubuntu Core for over a decade now, the most recent being Core 24 final June. It is not a general-purpose server OS, but it surely might be made into one. It could be attention-grabbing if Crimson Hat lastly made a play on this recreation. ®
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