Yes, have been seeing this too. Only spotted it when I tried to upvote.

Yeah, conceptually I like it. A while back I used to run my systems on Fedora which was great in that I always had the latest of everything, but doing updates every 6 months got tedious. Stream seems like a good compromise on the way to that.

The lack of stability is actually quite attractive to me. In a scientific environment we’re normally running fairly new, often unstable code, and we often hit problems because of using older versions of libraries / packages / compilers, so somthing which stays a bit more current would be good and we can deal with breakage if it happens. The trouble is the management systems around HPC assume you’re working on enterprise systems, which isn’t really true in our case.

I’ve looked at things like OpenHPC but they’re still on RHEL8 (RHEL9 is in testing but not released yet), and even lower level tools like warewulf is still only supporting RHEL8 at the moment which is getting too old for me to want to build a new system from it.

I’ve looked at more generic tools like Ansible and Chef / Puppet but before I go down that rabbit hole I’d like a sanity check that there isn’t something more suited that I’m missing.

Does this mean that X11 builds will work better than they currently do? Firefox has been unusable over remote X11 for quite a while now due to the way it renders its main display. The amount of traffic it generates when sending remote X events is so large that the interface is practically unusable. If they’re now partitioning Wayland support from X11 and are making the X support compatible with remote X then I’m all for this!

Snaps are a nightmare. I’ve been using a VNC based remote setup for ages for our online training. In the latest ubuntu LTS there’s a bug where applications installed via snaps don’t trigger the appropriate cgroup permissions when running under VNC so you can’t launch any of those applications. The bug is reported, verified and well described but no one from Canonical seems to be interested in applying a fix. I’ve ended up having to install a browser from the main Firefox site because I literally can’t get the snap installed version to run any more.

It looks like the downstream rebuilders are already working on this and are able to extract (with a bit more work) the information they need from the stream repo. How much Redhat tries to block these approaches remains to be seen, but if they can work around this so quickly then it seems a pretty petty stunt to pull.

https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

https://rockylinux.org/news/brave-new-world-path-forward/

I’m not clear what this means for distros like Alma or Rocky which used to rebuild the SRPMs that RedHat made available. Are they now dead in the water, or is there a more indirect way for them to get to the code. It looks like the CentOS Stream repository will have all of the code released by RHEL but it’s going to take a lot of work to find and extract those packages from the ongoing development, so that’s likely going to difficult if not unfeasible.

This is going to be a huge pain to anyone using these distros - it’s fine to say we should all move to Debian based distributions, but that sort of migration takes time and planning. If this is implemented immediately then you’re going to see a ton of unpatched systems around as existing distros lose support.