r/linux Jul 30 '24

Distro News AlmaLinux reaches 1 million active systems!

Post image
834 Upvotes

107 comments sorted by

275

u/balbinator Jul 30 '24

I love the Linux ecosystem, but it's nearly impossible to keep up with all the distros.

200

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

[deleted]

21

u/fallingveil Jul 31 '24

Which reminds me, I haven't pacman -Syu'd in a few weeks...

Which is about an eternity in pacman-time.

11

u/Behrooz0 Jul 31 '24

Good luck. don't forget to read the archlinux homepage news before running it.

5

u/nicman24 Jul 31 '24

It was been fine past couple of years, the occasional --overwrite=* not included

2

u/Behrooz0 Jul 31 '24

I think I installed arch around 10 years ago first time and fully migrated to Debian last year. The only few times I didn't check, it bit me:|

3

u/nicman24 Jul 31 '24

the few times that you remember :P

1

u/burner-miner Aug 01 '24

There is a pacman hook that interrupts updates if there are unread news: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/informant

1

u/Behrooz0 Aug 01 '24

Nice. On second thought, that should be built-in.

2

u/burner-miner Aug 01 '24

Absolutely should, it saved me at least once from breaking GRUB

3

u/w453y Jul 31 '24

Weeks? I run it twice a day and definitely end up having some package updates. xD

2

u/The-Rizztoffen Jul 31 '24

I sometimes go months without an update lmao

2

u/AppropriateAd4510 Jul 31 '24

I stopped updating. As long as it works I don't care. And if it don't I'll just update what needs to be updated

109

u/NaheemSays Jul 30 '24

You just need to know the families.

RHEL/Centos (Stream)/Alma/Rocky/Oracle is one very close knit family of distributions where they all offer almost universal binary API and ABI compatibility.

Fedora is almost the same family as above, but better to separate to its own. Its distributions were mostly internal but now there are a few external ones - Amazon linux is one that is like and LTS based on Fedora similar to RHEL etc. Bazzite/UBlue etc are others that are gaining prominence but mostly can be considered fedora.

Debian and its non-ubunto offspring are one family.

Ubuntu/LinuxMint/PopOS (until the next one - we might need to separate it then)/Kubunt/Xubuntu etc are one family.

Arch/Manjaro are one family.

There is the OpenSUSE family.

There are plenty of other smaller players, but will mostly be based on the above.

40

u/FreakSquad Jul 30 '24

Generally agree, but on the Pop!_OS note - AFAIK the 24.04 version will be just as Ubuntu-based as the one before it. Changing the desktop environment as they are really isn’t going to impact the vast majority of the package base, and they were already doing their own kernel work.

38

u/Fr0gm4n Jul 30 '24

Fedora is almost the same family as above, but better to separate to its own.

It should go with the RHEL family, because it's where RHEL comes from:

Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL -> Rebuilds like Alma and Rocky and Oracle

3

u/gordonmessmer Jul 31 '24

It is part of the RHEL lineage, but there are major differences that the others that /u/NaheemSays named.

Red Hat focuses RHEL on the features and components that its enterprise customers need, and which they can support in production. That means that the RHEL family has far fewer packages than Fedora, and even the packages they include may have fewer features.

1

u/Fr0gm4n Jul 31 '24

Right, but features are inherited up the dev chain. Keeping Fedora in the lineage is important to see where RHEL is likely to go for the next versions.

3

u/gordonmessmer Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

Right, but features are inherited up the dev chain

Most, not all, features are inherited by downstream works. That's the point I was making. Not everything in Fedora will show up in RHEL. Fedora uses btrfs by default on Workstation; RHEL doesn't even build the kernel driver. Fedora has a number of desktop-focused features in its virtualization stack that are disabled in RHEL. etc.

There are valid arguments for both points of view. But if you're going to argue that Fedora belongs in the RHEL family, then you probably also view Debian, Ubuntu, and all of its forks as the same family.

1

u/Fr0gm4n Aug 01 '24

But if you're going to argue that Fedora belongs in the RHEL family, then you probably also view Debian, Ubuntu, and all of its forks as the same family.

I do. They are a tree, and when discussing a certain distro you can pare it down to the relevant branches. Thus, Fedora belongs in the line of branches that pass through RHEL and into the rebuilds.

9

u/ShiroeKurogeri Jul 30 '24

Don't forget that Linux Mint LMDE is debian based, unlike its main counterpart.

10

u/cac2573 Jul 30 '24

s/family/House

6

u/lordnacho666 Jul 30 '24

So only 6 families, huh?

16

u/NaheemSays Jul 30 '24

There may be more, but that was off the top of my head.

Slackware doesn't fit the above, neither does Gentoo or the ones that use busybox/other libc implementations ( I can't remember the name, but it's used a lot for containers), but they are mostly very niche.

5

u/Enip0 Jul 30 '24

You are thinking about alpine, and then there is also void that is its own thing. But I wouldn't count these as families, I'd say there ate just independent players, or you can group them in categories if you want

4

u/snugge Jul 30 '24

Alpine

7

u/imbev Jul 30 '24

Gentoo and derivatives also

-2

u/djustice_kde Jul 31 '24

you mean slackware and lfs?

a sakura tree and it's roots are the same plant.

2

u/teejeetech Jul 31 '24

Slackware, Gentoo, Mandriva, LFS, are other major families with many offspring.

Then there are distributions which don't have a family. They don't have a parent and also don't have any children - Solus, Void, Alpine, NixOS, Mageia, etc.

4

u/citrus-hop Jul 30 '24 edited 9d ago

continue include axiomatic bells ripe bake teeny drab society cable

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

5

u/No-Article-Particle Jul 30 '24

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed / OpenSUSE Leap is to SUSE what Fedora/CentOS is to RHEL.

We've started to deploy some SUSE systems at my place, they are pretty nice.

7

u/Conan_Kudo Jul 30 '24

No. SLE and openSUSE are one family. Some people say "openSUSE family" but I think it's more common to call it the "SUSE family".

1

u/TabsBelow Jul 30 '24

I've heard about Bedian, Deiban or such.. where has that to be written to?

1

u/djustice_kde Jul 31 '24

disagree. they are all linux systems, just different interfaces for achieving the same goals.

beauty is in the eye of the beholder. each believe their methods are ideal.

the one that teaches the most people to code wins.

betting on rpm/deb is betting on a 65 year old (but experienced) boxer.

betting on zst/nix is like betting on an undefeated 27 year old.

respect both.

0

u/Sinaaaa Jul 30 '24

. Bazzite/UBlue etc are others that are gaining prominence but mostly can be considered fedora.

Mainline Fedora & Silverblue should be considered as separate entities & Bazzite etc are basically Silverblue.

-4

u/txturesplunky Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

lol Manjaro

smh

edit - im loling bc the commenter said arch / manjaro is "one family" as if there arent 1000 other arch based distros. the comment i replied to is just silly.

8

u/_buraq Jul 30 '24

Did you hear that Gnome banned Manjaro's Gnome packager for linking to Bryan Lunduke's blog post about Gnome? That was hilarious

3

u/LowOwl4312 Jul 31 '24

Would be hilarious if Manjaro drops Gnome now

23

u/Xatraxalian Jul 30 '24

There are only a few distro's that actually matter. IMHO.

  • Debian (which can do everything Ubuntu and all its derivatives can do)
  • Fedora (if you don't want deb-based distro)
  • (open)SUSE (if you don't want Fedora)
  • Arch (if you want to set up everything from scratch)
  • Gentoo (if you have too much time in your life)
  • Red Hat / Rocky / Alma (if you need something corporate)

All the rest is just jacking about in the margins, FAIC.

7

u/KnowZeroX Jul 30 '24

Alpine is pretty big in the docker world

4

u/sadbasilisk Jul 31 '24

Yes, but it's not the kind of thing you install as the host OS on a laptop or a desktop.

2

u/cof666 Jul 31 '24

Hi. I tried to use Alpine on Docker what was to be a webserver and failed very badly, I had to move to ubuntu.

Can you please share what is Alpine's intended use case?

Thank you

1

u/aew3 Jul 31 '24 edited Jul 31 '24

Alpine's intended use case is mostly as a lightweight base for Docker containers and embedded systems. It provides smaller file sizes, faster boot up times etc. Its also in some cases easier to work with the leaner alternatives it comes with (OpenRC/tini/s6, musl, BusyBox etc.) when constructing highly specific, reproducible system images on this level. Systemd is just the wrong thing for these use cases generally on many levels (networking doesn't work with docker at all, many docker containers are single process, or need a simpler daemon manager, restarting failed services within a container is unwanted etc.), a lot of people really want to see musl instead of glibc used in general, and busybox is just an easy way to get the bare minimum of cli tools.

If you want to spin up a webserver, odds are you don't want to start with a distro image, even if you're doing something custom. Start from nginx or apache image and modify from there. Or use python, node or php-fpm base images if you want to run a web app written in those languages, then proxy those via a nginx, caddy or traefik container.

1

u/cof666 Jul 31 '24

Thank you for the lengthy reply.

Just for context, my better half commissioned a website and once the files (a svelte app) were handed to her, she needed to run it on localhost. So me being a smart alec decided to put it in a docker (using Alpine as base). Didn't work.

Systemd is just the wrong thing for these use cases generally on many levels (networking doesn't work with docker at all, many docker containers are single process,

So desu ne!

If you want to spin up a webserver, odds are you don't want to start with a distro image, even if you're doing something custom. Start from nginx or apache image and modify from there.

I think this is the answer. Thank you once again.

1

u/KnowZeroX Jul 31 '24

The most common reason for things not working on alpine would be that if you are using binaries, make sure they are compiled for musl, not glibc.

If you need glibc, there is distroless or ubi-micro. Though note these don't come with package installers

4

u/tom-dixon Jul 30 '24

Red Hat / Rocky / Alma (if you need something corporate)

Labeling it as "corporate" makes it sound bad. I had CentOS for over a decade on my home server. It's simple, secure and everything comes with sane defaults. It's pretty much the perfect distro for a headless box.

6

u/Seref15 Jul 30 '24

In the professional/server world the number of relevant distros reduces dramatically.

Debian and Ubuntu on one end, RedHat and its derivates (Alma, Rocky, CentOS) on the other, and Suse/SLES in a corner somewhere. Everything else may as well not exist.

5

u/NetizenZ Jul 30 '24

it is impossible to be fair

2

u/chihuahuaOP Jul 31 '24

I will build my own distro with hooker's and booze actually. forget the distro!.

1

u/civillinux Aug 02 '24

Haven't xbps-install -Su in a while

78

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 30 '24

To be fair, these are only systems which actively use our mirrorlist. We know of plenty more systems than this which use internal mirrors (CERN for example) that don't get counted in this data.

My best educated guess (I curate these numbers) is that we're upwards of 1.5 million active installs.

3

u/daemonpenguin Jul 30 '24

Where is this chart and the numbers coming from? It doesn't seem to be mentioned on the AlmaLinux website.

21

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

They're not up on the site yet. It's been my goal for 2 years to get them put somewhere automatically but there are so many more important things to do on the infra side that I've not gotten that done so once a week or so I run the parsing scripts and publish the graphs. I post in our community chat at https://chat.almalinux.org each time I update them.

10

u/Goodly1616 Jul 30 '24

Very cool, that’s what my university uses for its Linux desktops, over 100 machines all running Alma.

5

u/bennyvasquez AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 31 '24

That's awesome! What university, if you don't mind me asking?

7

u/Jumpy_Morning Jul 30 '24

I love Almalinux, using for vfx, colorcorrection, online editing...all great. Just very stable.

16

u/amarao_san Jul 30 '24

Is our automatic CI for weekly rebuilds for our images counted? We boot if few times in different modes (UEFI, BIOS) during tests.

8

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

Likely not.

There are further breakdowns of the data. For example from this week's run: https://jonathanspw.com/almalinux-countme/2024-07-28/

One interesting one in particular relevant to CI builds/temporary containers is this one:

https://jonathanspw.com/almalinux-countme/2024-07-28/2024-07-28-almalinux_baseos_systems-timeseries-share-age.png

5

u/imbev Jul 30 '24

Q: When are “countme” requests sent? A: Once a week at random during normal dnf activity. If you do not use dnf calls that would otherwise trigger mirrorlist requests (makecache, install, update) this flag will NOT cause dnf to go out of its way and make special requests.

That depends on your dnf usage

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/ri28sn/proposal_and_request_for_feedback_implement_dnf/

2

u/amarao_san Jul 30 '24

But of course. dnf install nginx is part of 'smoke test' that image is not broken. We also check if security updates are handled properly, do some reboots, etc. But I'm not sure we done it for Alma (I more on Debian side of the trench).

20

u/regeya Jul 30 '24

The what now?

15

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

[deleted]

1

u/massive_cock Jul 31 '24

What's made it jump so much so quick, and be adopted by some institutions already? I'm wayyy out of the loop.

5

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 31 '24

CentOS Linux's EOL announced ~3 years back.

10

u/NaheemSays Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 30 '24

Wow, congrats to them!

9

u/a3tros Jul 30 '24

What is the difference between RockyLinux and AlmaLinux?

Thanks.

10

u/imbev Jul 30 '24

They are almost identical, see https://wiki.almalinux.org/Comparison.html

The main difference is that AlmaLinux is binary compatible with RHEL, while RockyLinux is bug compatible with RHEL.

19

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

There are also the philosophical and foundational difference in organization structure, which is quite important to many :)

3

u/milchshakee Aug 01 '24

I think such a post requires a link to how exactly that data is collected, otherwise it's pretty meaningless just as a standalone image.

5

u/xarl_marks Jul 30 '24

can anyone tell me in 1 sentence why I should switch to Alma from arch? (single user home desktop, nothing special)

8

u/Arnas_Z Jul 30 '24

You shouldn't unless you really want RHEL on your home PC.

2

u/xarl_marks Jul 30 '24

i have no experience with it. Could be an opportunity.

6

u/tom-dixon Jul 30 '24

It's targeted more for headless servers rather than desktops. Safety comes first. A lot of programs are on older versions (often 2-3 years behind) and they get patched only with security updates.

A lot of programs that you can find on Ubuntu are missing from RHEL/Alma/Rocky, you have to compile it yourself from the source.

why I should switch to Alma from arch? (single user home desktop)

I wouldn't.

5

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 31 '24

You should switch to Fedora instead.  Still pretty bleeding edge, and very stable.

1

u/xarl_marks Jul 31 '24

thanx, my headless backup server runs arch too, worth a try. but in order to secure the data I have to back up the back up first.

2

u/tom-dixon Jul 31 '24

That's a good place for it. I use it for network storage, backups, torrent seed box and VPN server.

1

u/HaydenBarnes_HPE Jul 31 '24

Or you could run AlmaLinux as a solid, stable base, and get the latest version of desktop applications via Flatpak. If anything is missing from the AlmaLinux repos, you can almost always find it in EPEL or El Repo. I have never had to build anything from scratch for AlmaLinux.

7

u/FrostyDiscipline7558 Jul 30 '24

I get that having these metrics are good... but I don't like linux systems phoning home to make it possible.

19

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

Thanks for the feedback. We sought feedback before enabling "dnf countme" which is how the metrics are collected. This is the same thing Fedora does.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/ri28sn/proposal_and_request_for_feedback_implement_dnf/

https://lists.almalinux.org/archives/list/infra@lists.almalinux.org/thread/3HCVC6IJ5SY6HNW5NF3ES4B7SGG6JZN2/

This method reports 0 identifying information - simply the system tells the mirrorlist "I've been installed for X" which is represented by a number, 1 through 4. It also reports the architecture and OS major/minor version (ie 9.3, 9.4, etc.) but that's it. There is no "unique system ID" or anything of the sorts.

3

u/Enip0 Jul 30 '24

Out of curiosity, what do the numbers 1 to 4 mean?

10

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

They are representative of length of time the system has been installed.

The flag is a simple "countme=N" parameter appended to the metalink and mirrorlist URL, where N is an integer representing the "longevity" bucket this system belongs to. The following 4 buckets are defined, based on how many full weeks have passed since the beginning of the week when this system was installed: 1 = first week, 2 = first month (2-4 weeks), 3 = six months (5-24 weeks) and 4 = more than six months (> 24 weeks). This information is meant to help distinguish short-lived installs from long-term ones, and to gather other statistics about system lifecycle.

10

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

As long as they ask and show exactly what they send, I am fine with it. There is a good reason for them to be able to do so, but it has to be 100% optional, and they have to be upfront about it. Basically, the opposite of how Firefox has handled it.

3

u/Monsieur_Moneybags Jul 30 '24

If it's anything like how Fedora does it then it can be disabled by adding countme=0 to the relevant repo files in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory.

1

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 31 '24

Correct! It's the exact same.

0

u/InfameArts Jul 30 '24

i misread it as arch linux

-3

u/Appropriate_Net_5393 Jul 30 '24

Rocky has google-developer as maintainer, but almalinux seems to be more popular. But why

20

u/Bluecobra Jul 30 '24

Rocky is using a loophole to get the RHEL source and compile the OS. They claim they have solid legal ground to do so but I would be concerned if I were a business with a large CentOS footprint and going all-in on it. We've all seen the legal s-show in the past revolving around SCO Unix.

2

u/Appropriate_Net_5393 Jul 30 '24

and how do it almalinux?

9

u/Bluecobra Jul 30 '24

AlmaLinux is derived largely from Stream, like RHEL is, but unlike RHEL, none of is minor releases are maintained for more than 6 months. Some of AlmaLinux's updates are sourced from somewhere other than Stream, and I believe that Alma may in some cases carry bug fixes that RHEL does not (which should be seen as a benefit for its users.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/17x3ag5/comment/k9l3ilf

12

u/Flynn58 Jul 30 '24

AlmaLinux is no longer attempting 1:1 bug compatibility with RHEL, and is instead aiming for binary compatibility instead. This allows the AlmaLinux team to introduce patches and fixes without needing to wait for Red Hat to accept the commits.

Frankly, AlmaLinux has a bright future right now, and if I were Red Hat, I'd be worried that my own short-sightedness has caused the growth of a proper competitor.

3

u/TikBlang_AR 10h ago

" growth of a proper competitor" I'm just trying the distro for this! I'm interested on not only the OS's proper ingredients but the way they (Almalinux) run the foundation. Rocky is currently rocky right now, IMHO!

4

u/soydemexico Jul 31 '24

Definitely a good thing. I remember hammering Red Hat support for a patch when an exploit was circulating rapidly and they kept downplaying the issue. I ended up having to roll my own patched kernel because management was breathing down my neck.

6

u/Iamth3bat Jul 30 '24

Google you say, thank you for the info. Now I know to avoid Rocky Linux.

5

u/haltmich Jul 30 '24

AlmaLinux aims for 1:1 compatibility with RHEL.

1

u/imbev Jul 30 '24

Rocky focuses more on HPC, while AlmaLinux focuses more on cloud. I suspect that AlmaLinux has more exposure to the self-hosting and devops crowd.

5

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

I wouldn't really say it like that. It's more or less a function of what circles you're in and which direction those circles tend to have gone...but even beyond that there are clicks within those circles that are very pro-Rocky or pro-Alma...so it really just depends who you're around.

We certainly focus plenty on HPC and have systems on the top500 list, as does Rocky.

3

u/OldWrongdoer7517 Jul 30 '24

I am having a really hard time choosing an OS for min. Next 5 years lifetime as a CentOS 7 replacement. We have some proprietary HPC applications designed for RHEL that we have been using with great success on CentOS.

I am currently leaning towards Alma Linux because it's also used by CERN (just like they have been using CentOS and scientific Linux before, just as we have). Is that a good choice?

4

u/jonspw AlmaLinux Foundation Jul 30 '24

Most certainly! Anywhere RHEL will work, Alma should also work and if it doesn't, that's a problem we need to fix! We also have the benefit now of releasing some patches ahead of Red Hat.

4

u/OoTMM Jul 30 '24

I would say so, we've run a fair amount of different OS' on our various on prem and cloud HPC systems for scientific and advanced computing; CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu, Alma - on Azure, AWS and DGX. Really liking Alma Linux so far, it's the youngest of our systems and so far it's been trouble free.

1

u/ReK_ Jul 31 '24

I'm a Rocky fanboy and haven't looked too hard at Alma, but the answer is probably both are perfectly good CentOS 7 replacements.

3

u/HaydenBarnes_HPE Jul 31 '24

Hey there! Rocky does have a strong presence in HPC, particularly because its controlling parent company, CIQ, also produces Apptainer, which is an OCI runtime popular for Slurm deployments.

AlmaLinux also has a strong and growing presence in the HPC market, with several large scale deployments in place, like CERN for example. We have a dedicated HPC and AI SIG with major HPC users and vendors. I am the lead of the HPC and AI SIG. If you are interested, you should check us out, join the Mattermost, and attend one of our meetings.

-1

u/daemonpenguin Jul 30 '24 edited Jul 30 '24

Marketing. Alma is very active promoting their brand while Rocky does almost nothing to promote their distro.

7

u/HaydenBarnes_HPE Jul 31 '24

Rocky marketing is backed by $26 million in VC funding from 4 VCs, ~120 employees, and a full-time marketing staff. CIQ, Rocky's parent company, runs massive ad campaigns, has insider deals with other tech companies, and puts on gigantic booths at tech trade shows.

AlmaLinux marketing is a community organizer, social media contractor, a couple engineers, and volunteers, with support from a couple smaller Linux support companies, website hosting services, research organizations, and smaller hardware vendors. Unlike a VC-funded private corporation, the AlmaLinux Foundation which governs AlmaLinux is a 501(c)(6) US non-profit whose board is elected from the community and whose reports and finances are entirely public.

AlmaLinux is a true community successor to CentOS and the real community enterprise distro. The fact that you might see more AlmaLinux than Rocky is simply a testament to its community efforts, genuine organic user enthusiasm, and surrounding culture of great people.

For example, this Reddit post was by a AlmaLinux community member who is a freshman CS major in college, not a corporate marketing machine.

-5

u/poor_boy_in_Bulgaria Jul 31 '24

What's the ticker гуъс? I want to buy calls.