It's interesting because there's a question in the air right now over what fork of CentOS will be its spiritual successor since it got bought out. Will it be Alma, or Rocky? This post holds in favor of Alma.
As much as it pains me to say it, FOSS devs are a finite resource and it seems that being divided is just as if having been conquered. Neither Rocky nor Alma are progressing at the rate that a CentOS fork with a hostile RH upstream would progress if they were working together and not duplicating efforts.
What is the philosophical schism between the two? Why can't they split the workload on a single distro and reunite the communities?
It's just like with any distribution, each have their own philosophies and how they want to tackle something. Oracle Linux is still around for example, but we don't talk about them too often.
Rocky seems to have mostly volunteers. Alma has people who are likely paid because they come from or likely still work for CloudLinux. Either way, you're getting a RHEL clone if you go with either. And that is keeping in mind that devs are a finite resource and always will be, regardless of how you look at it.
The thing to keep in mind is that more choices are better than just having one. Think about it, let's say Scientific Linux actually made an 8. CentOS users would've likely gone over to them instead at the EOL date. Since SL didn't keep going, there was only CentOS (and Oracle Linux, but again no one really wants to talk about that - and there are folks who will avoid oracle like the plague; I don't blame them). You take away the one distribution a large amount of folks used and where are they going to go? Stream? Fermilab/CERN were going to stream and... not anymore. Perhaps the bugs and instability were a bit too much.
The long story short of it is, you don't want another situation like CentOS. More options, the better. All EL derivatives/clones should all operate and work the same.
> The thing to keep in mind is that more choices are better than just having one.
I disagree that this is universally true. If (as it seems) Rocky and Alma have similar philosophies then significant dev resources are being duplicated, at the expense of other functionality.
> Fermilab/CERN were going to stream and... not anymore. Perhaps the bugs and instability were a bit too much.
Not exactly. CentOS Stream is still a standard offering for them, and they've told me they are pretty happy with the stability and getting faster bug fixes. The problem is that too many third party vendors are refusing to keep their software compatible with CentOS Stream, so the environments that depend on those vendor's software must stay pinned to RHEL or a RHEL clone. It's unfortunate because if those vendors also targeted CentOS Stream they would be compatible with new RHEL minor releases on day 1, rather than forcing their users to pin to older minor versions while they play catch up.
