Fedora is too unstable for Servers - Use CentOS Stream?

[driverpt]

After seeing your announcement, not that i don't like Fedora, but Fedora is more suited for Desktop and daily usage, i find it too Unstable for Server environment.

I suggest switching to CentOS Stream which is more Stable for Servers.

[stewartsmith]

Amazon Linux 2022 (and beyond) aren't direct rebuilds of Fedora, we base on Fedora and modify it as needed to solve our customer problems (such as a longer life cycle for a particular release).

What specifically do you find unstable about Fedora? Is it particular bugs? ABI compatibility between releases? Behaviour changes between releases?

[stewartsmith]

I'm asking about specific concerns as it's also true that Fedora is the base for RHEL and thus also CentOS, so I am unclear as to what specific problems you've observed with Fedora and how one downstream distribution largely derived from Fedora would be affected by them and another would not.

[jaltman]

I'm asking about specific concerns as it's also true that Fedora is the base for RHEL and thus also CentOS, so I am unclear as to what specific problems you've observed with Fedora and how one downstream distribution largely derived from Fedora would be affected by them and another would not.

It is true that Fedora used to be the base for RHEL but that is no longer true. The current flow is Fedora to CentOS Stream to RHEL.

The benefit of CentOS Stream is that it provides the community the ability contribute changes that flow directly into minor RHEL updates. Unlike old CentOS or Alma or Rocky which provide no path for community investment. Facebook, CERN, Fermilab and others are active contributors to CentOS Stream. There are also active SIGs in the CentOS Stream community.

[driverpt]

Currently i'd risk saying that Fedora is on the same level as Arch Linux, which means Bleeding Edge Packages.

I don't want a package upgrade messing up my deployments in EC2 (Installed via ASG + EC2 Metadata Script), which is much more likely to happen in Fedora.

[stewartsmith]

We're very conscious about package updates and their impact on customers deployments. There's two ways we're addressing this in AL2022: 1) continuing our care in choosing what to update in Amazon Linux and when (like we do with AL2 today) and 2) the version locking feature of AL2022 means you never get updates without explicitly taking action to update the version you're locked to.

[crabby345]

You're not adding Fedora repos directly (or not intended to) so AWS are just taking control of the filter through and deciding when a Fedora package is stable enough to be incorporated.

I imagine a lot of the decisions will parallel CentOS Stream/Rhel/Rocky, but with flexibility to diversify. I thought AL2 was already a hybrid combination of CentOS and direct Fedora.