I was asked by deeplow to forward/summarize info from the "Alt RPM Distro (CentOS?) in dom0" forum thread [alt-thread] to make it more visible to devs.
CentOS Stream is an attractive candidate for use in dom0 due to its stability, LTS cycle, compatibility with Fedora, and signing of both packages and metadata. The main concerns raised about CentOS were outdated kernels, the limited set of available userland packages, the stability of CentOS Stream, and the desire for a "minimal" distro. Recent developments largely address these concerns: * RHEL has moved to a 3-year cycle for major releases and there is a Hyperscaler SIG [hyper-sig] working on accelerated backports; including LTS kernel releases and core userland software such as systemd. This is inline with Qubes' ~2±1 year release cadence. * CentOS Stream is part of Red Hat's infrastructure modernization effort to create a continuous integration pipeline from Fedora to CentOS and its derivatives. This effort *should* reduce the friction for getting packages available in Fedora to EPEL. * CentOS Stream is intended to be as stable as RHEL proper. Source and community rebuilds are available for the skiddish, however, Red Hat has expanded its free license tier to 16 production instances. Qubes also probably qualifies for Red Hat's FOSS infrastructure program. * Fedora Silverblue, Fedora CoreOS, Fedora Minimal, and Red Hat's Universal Base Image are all freely available and competitive with other "minimal" distros in terms of TCB and feature set. Rocky Linux confirmed over Matrix that RHCOS rebuilds are in the works. While it will take time for this work to yield results, I was able to find many of the packages from fepitre’s copr repo in EPEL and AppStreams and the AltArch SIG apparently already carries a backported kernel. I think it's worth exploring collaboration through the CentOS Special Interest Groups [sigs] and/or a custom [Fedora]/[CentOS]/[Silverblue] distro to expand the package availability and upstream maintenance. Sane people disagree, see [alt-thread] for caveats and spirited debate. I hope this was helpful. -Zach Lym [alt-thread]: https://qubes-os.discourse.group/t/alt-rpm-distro-centos-in-dom0/2016/19 [hyper-sig]: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Hyperscale [sigs]: https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup [Fedora]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Spins_Custom [CentOS]: https://centos.org/variants/#making-variants [Silverblue]: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/minimal-or-custom-silverblue-ostree-images/1574/20 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to qubes-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-devel/9e99203c-1dee-4e9d-905e-a8af0a3a5e22n%40googlegroups.com.
