The small world of GNU/Linux distributions is not necessarily a calm world: somewhat surprisingly, the company Red Hat, which in particular distributes the commercial Linux distribution Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), announced the sources of this distribution would no longer be public . Only those from CentOS Stream remain accessible.
All this may sound a bit complicated, but we will explain it to you. A GNU/Linux distribution (hereafter Linux) can be viewed as a complete operating system with all the tools necessary for its operation. Some are limited to a specific use, others are aimed at a broader audience, and RHEL is a commercial distro aimed at businesses, particularly because Red Hat offers paid support for its distro.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Grayms, GPL)
In its blog post, Red Hat explains that the RHEL sources are no longer publicly available – they remain available for customers and partners – and that the only Red Hat distribution whose sources are still available is CentOS Stream. This is a so-called upstream version of RHEL, i.e. a derived version that is developed upstream. In a simpler way, Red Hat developers test new features first via CentOS Stream, which therefore contains newer versions of the various software…but potentially more bugs as well.
The comparison with the different versions of macOS is a bit complicated: CentOS Stream cannot be compared directly with a beta version of Apple’s operating system, and Apple does not offer an equivalent of RHEL that could possibly be considered a stabilized version and followed by a previous one macOS.
A problem related to forks
But why is Red Hat partially discontinuing its main distribution? Probably to partially protect the main actors. In fact, the world of Linux distributions essentially consists of so-called forks. The literal translation is fork, since a fork starts from a distribution to create a new branch. And Red Hat doesn’t particularly like it when companies offer forks that are fully compatible with RHEL. RHEL-derived distributions can actually replace the distribution, which is obviously a potential loss for Red Hat. The best known are AlmaLinux (quite new), Rocky Linux or Oracle Linux.
AlmaLinux (WikipeidaNeko, CC BY-SA 4.0)
As Phoronix explains, the AlmaLinux developers have responded to this change. You obviously discovered this change by accident and don’t know Red Hat’s intentions. For now, therefore, development is likely to be complicated: cloning CentOS Stream is obviously not an option. The main problem lies in the differences between RHEL and CentOS Stream, which are a bit too experimental to offer the perfect compatibility expected by AlmaLinux users. In a way, the survival of distributions derived from RHEL is at risk, at least in the current configuration.
Let’s finish with a point: the only Linux distro compatible with Apple Silicon Macs – Asahi Linux – isn’t from a Red Hat distro, it’s from Arch Linux.