CERN and Fermi Lab bet on AlmaLinux, which is perfectly compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen Coje_He for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com, December 9, 2020, IBM's Red Hat announced that it would stop using CentOS as a stand-alone distribution and instead launch a rolling update release, CentOS Stream, as the upstream beta version of the enterprise distribution RHEL.

Since then, the community has launched a number of projects to replace CentOS, the most prominent of which are two: Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation-sponsored Rocky Linux; and AlmaLinux OS Foundation's AlmaLinux.

Since then, the two distributions have been competing with each other. CTOnews.com learned that AlamaLinux has the advantage of faster updates; Rocky Linux has a larger user base, and both distributions have their own fans.

It is worth mentioning that AlmaLinux is compatible with RHEL binaries and can run RHEL-certified applications without paying for using RHEL.

Now Fermi Lab, a famous scientific research institution, and the European Institute of Particle Physics (CERN) have issued a joint statement announcing that they will adopt AlmaLinux in their research facilities.

According to the official statement, the advantages of AlmaLinux include long life support for each major version, support for extended architecture, rapid release cycle, upstream community contribution, support for security advisory metadata, and perfect compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other refactoring versions.

CERN and Fermilab plan to continue to use RHEL for a limited number of services and applications. CERN is expected to continue to support CERN CentOS 7, similar to Scientific Linux 7, another out-of-date release, until June 2024.

Last month, Rocky Linux set up its own foundation, Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF). But RESF is not what people think of as a non-profit. It is a Delaware-based public welfare company that has shareholders and can seek profits.