Red Hat released version 9.4 today. Lots of jargon (including a mention of AI), but one of the big deals considering how long Red Hat support contracts go is the addition of ARM64 as a supported architecture. 9to5Linux also had a summary of the new features.

I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.

Now that we’ve had a few months to consider Red Hat’s new course code policy, I wanted to share my thoughts since I’ve been a user of Red Hat’s Fedora since it started back in 2003. I’ve also made heavy use of CentOS and am currently running a server using one of the free RHEL licences that came about from the CentOS Stream controversy. I want to start off with my thoughts and then how I think we may end up in a better place anyway.

On 8 Dec I saw the announcement that Red Hat (which had made CentOS an in-house distro a year or two ago) was changing CentOS from being a free clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to focusing solely on CentOS Stream. ( The CentOS press release; The Red Hat press release) This would make the progression of features and elements: Fedora -> CentOS Stream -> RHEL. At first, like many others, I felt hurt by this change. It will take place at the end of next year. Usually CentOS follows a support widow similar to that of RHEL, so I was expecting a decade or so for the servers I converted from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8. While I generally run Fedora on many of my computers, I prefer not to have to upgrade every 6 months for my servers. That’s a level of disruption I could do without. That said, after I read this blog post, I had a slightly more nuanced view of things. I still think it should have taken effect with CentOS 9, which I think is due in the next year or so (RH is accelerating releases of new RHELs). But it certainly makes a clearer upstream to downstream path for Red Hat.