this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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If we take stability as a parameter, is it safe to match them like this?

  • Fedora --> Ubuntu
  • CentOS Stream --> Ubuntu LTS
  • RHEL --> Debian

I know that CentOS stream is more kind of a rolling release but... feels like an LTS distro in practice... or it is just me?

Edit: adding some context. I am planning to setup a dev machine that I will connect to remotely and would like to babysit very little while having stable and fresh packages. In the Ubuntu world we would go to an LTS release but on the RPM/Dnf world is there any other distro apart from CentOS Stream? And also is CentOS Stream comparable to an LTS release at all considering that they do not have release number?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I have asked the same question on Reddit and a Fedora maintainer has provided some additional info that goes against what you, me and the general public thinks in terms of Stream being a “rolling release”

CentOS Stream definitely has releases. Stream is a build of the major-release branch of RHEL. Every RHEL minor release is just a snapshot of Stream that gets continued maintenance.

The confusion around this came from some early descriptions of Stream from Red Hat staff, who called it a "rolling release." And one of the reasons I made those diagrams that compare RHEL to other releases is that from the point of view of someone who works on RHEL -- which is a set of feature-stable releases -- the idea that Stream is rolling relative to RHEL makes sense. But that terminology is very confusing, because from the point of view of people who work anywhere else in the Free Software ecosystem, Stream is just a normal stable release, because most of the Free Software community isn't building feature-stable release series like Red Hat is.

I've seen a number of Red Hat engineers call the use of that term a mistake, and they don't use it any more

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/s/L8qR3QtADf

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Whatever terms they want to use for CentOS Stream is fine with me. The main thing I was trying to communicate is that it's not worth using, and nothing in the linked post contradicts that