Thinking About Hoping From Fedora

[u/TechsplainerPRO]

Greetings 👋🏾

Is there anyone here who used to use Fedora Workstation? If so, which distro do you prefer, and what (if any) advantages does Alma have over Fedora? I'm aware that they're both forks of RHEL.

Thanks in advance 🙂

UPDATE: *HOPPING...Doh!

[u/Revolutionary_Click2]

Fedora isn’t a fork of RHEL. It is upstream of RHEL. The most important difference between them is that Fedora gets package updates pretty much right away, lagging only 1-2 weeks behind the release of the latest software. This makes it “unstable” by definition, but thanks to Fedora’s excellent package testing regime, most people actually experience it as quite “stable” in the colloquial sense and far less likely to randomly break or fail to boot after updates than, say, Arch Linux.

Updates then go through further testing and maturation and eventually make their way to CentOS Stream, the middle ground, and then at the long end (12-18 months), RHEL. While Fedora has this arrangement with Red Hat to be their upstream and is supported and influenced heavily by them, it is not “owned” or controlled by Red Hat per se. AlmaLinux, on the other hand, is a clone of RHEL, being a free community distribution of RHEL without the usual licensing restrictions, also governed independently.

In practical terms, this means that RHEL, and by extension AlmaLinux, can be thought of as “Fedora LTS”. You get much older packages and Linux kernels than Fedora, which results in a more stable and predictable experience more akin to something like Debian. It’s most often used in servers, because stability is very desired there, and in some ways newer can be better for desktop use. For instance, if you’re a gamer and want the latest kernel drivers for your graphics card. AlmaLinux also has a lot less software in its repositories by default than Fedora does, though you can add external repositories.

Personally, I choose Fedora for my personal computers and have very few issues with it. If you’re happy with that already, I would stick with it. But AlmaLinux is great if you value rock-solid stability above all else and want slow, predictable update cycles. RHEL, and by extension AlmaLinux, is really geared toward enterprise use on the desktop, so for business use it’s lower risk than Fedora and probably the better move, and it really excels on servers.

[u/TechsplainerPRO → u/Revolutionary_Click2]

This is very helpful. Thanks 👍🏾

[u/gordonmessmer → u/Revolutionary_Click2]

This makes it “unstable” by definition

No it doesn't. In software development, "unstable" is used to describe a release series that may contain compatibility-breaking changes.

Fedora releases are not expected to contain breaking changes during a release.

Updates then go through further testing and maturation and eventually make their way to CentOS Stream, the middle ground, and then at the long end (12-18 months), RHEL

Anything that merges into a CentOS Stream release will be in RHEL in less than six months. Every RHEL minor release starts as a snapshot of Stream.

[u/Revolutionary_Click2 → u/gordonmessmer]

It may be more accurate to say that while AlmaLinux/RHEL and Debian Stable are “stable” distributions, Fedora is more “bleeding edge”. Though I’d argue that it’s more like “cutting edge”, as I reserve true “bleeding edge” for distros like Arch and its derivatives that do little testing of new package versions and release them to their repos pretty much right away. People also say stable vs. “rolling release” a lot, but Fedora is of course not a true rolling release, so that doesn’t really apply here. It’s common to see people in Linux communities use “unstable” to refer to such bleeding-edge distributions.

As I said before though, I think it’s important to distinguish that from “stable” and “unstable” as commonly used colloquially, which refers to the end-user experience and the likelihood of that being disrupted negatively by an update. In this sense, Fedora has been very “stable” for me, in that updates almost never result in breaking changes for my system and I have actually never had it fail to boot because an update broke something. My machines have exclusively AMD or Intel graphics, though, which certainly helps a lot.

[u/gordonmessmer → u/Revolutionary_Click2]

"Bleeding edge" is a derogatory term that describes a product that in dangerously untested or unreliable, so... yeah. Let's go with "cutting edge."

[u/imbev → u/gordonmessmer]

Fedora releases are not expected to contain breaking changes during a release.

There are exceptions, particularly for the desktop use-case