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?
- RHEL is more akin to Ubuntu LTS with a Canonical support contract.
- CentOS Stream is more like openSUSE Tumbleweed. I’m not aware of any mainstream apt-based distros that have that kind of rolling release cycle.
- Fedora is like Ubuntu.
But it’s not really a 1:1 comparison, since they all have different ideologies when it comes to package management and update cycles.
Opensure Tumbleweed is more like Fedora Rawhide, they get the absolute bleeding Edge. CentOS stream is downstream of Fedora, so you get less newer packages
I disagree, since both Stream and Tumbleweed are rolling releases with solid bases. openSUSE rigorously tests packages before deploying to the stable branch.
Ultimately, there’s not going to be a perfect analog between all of them, because like I said, they all have different ideologies and packaging goals.
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?
CentOS Stream is not a distro, it’s the carcass of the distro that Red Hat killed, CentOS. Stream is a beta testing program for RHEL, no more, no less. CentOS wasn’t even a Red Hat project originally, but Red Hat hired the maintainers of CentOS and gained control over it.
When Red Hat killed CentOS, going revising CentOS 8’s previous end of life from the end of May 2029 to the end of December 2021, one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, started Rocky Linux as a replacement for what CentOS was supposed to be, an open source, binary-compatible version of RHEL. Rocky Linux works well for this purpose. I’ve heard that Alma Linux does, as well, but I have never tried it.
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?
CentOS Stream should not be used for anything beyond hobby projects. It is, by nature, buggier than Rocky Linux or RHEL, and it was never intended to be stable. And there’s no reason to use it: If you want more stable versions than Fedora, Rocky Linux works just fine.
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
