Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, RHEL, CentOS - Which Is BEST for You?
Near the end of 2020, Red Hat decided to kill CentOS as we know it—kind of. We’ll get that a bit later. But for now, let’s examine Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all of the clones and forks that we have available. So, let’s get to it. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL for short, is a Linux distribution developed by, believe it or not, Red Hat. RHEL is an RPM-based distribution that uses the DNF package manager and follows a more LTS-like release cycle with an older package base. RHEL’s package base actually comes from earlier versions of Fedora, making Fedora a testing ground for different changes that may come to Red Hat. For example, the latest version of RHEL 9.0 is based on Fedora 34 from March 2021. Do note, though, that while Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and uses some Red Hat infrastructure, Fedora is still its own project that may make decisions against Red Hat. Another thing that makes Red Hat special is that a lot of modern technology in the Linux world is either significantly funded by Red Hat or run or heavily contributed to by Red Hat developers, A bunch of examples of this include GNOME Shell, SELinux, SystemD, PackageKit, Wayland, D-Bus, and many other projects. However, another thing that made Red Hat different is that it’s a paid Linux distro, but paying for it gives you support and docs from the Red Hat company. ...