> which is slightly upstream and less stable than RHEL
As a user who almost exclusively uses rolling release OS-es, is this actually something people care about? CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora -- and Fedora is a rock solid base. It's not like CentOS Stream is riddled with bugs, broken features, etc.
If you wanted a distro that was similar to but not exactly the same as RHEL, then Fedora itself would be a way better choice. And if you care that it's exactly the same as RHEL, then CentOS Stream doesn't cut it.
This is absurd. CentOS Stream isn't just "similar", it has ABI compatibility with RHEL, it's waaaaay more stable than Fedora because the most it can be different from RHEL in general terms is the difference between two Y-releases (e.g. 9.Y -> 9.Y+1)
This is the first time I have heard of SUSE Liberty Linux as an alternative to RHEL... when I went searching for information on it, all I could find was the product page and some press releases.
It's hard to read between the lines of the marketing speak but it sounds like it's just a suite of paid support options for existing RHEL/CentOS deployments and not a RHEL derivative that one can just download and use. Unless I am missing something?
No it is actually a RHEL derivative, but personally I wouldn't go that direction unless you intend to eventually move to other SUSE stuff. They committed a chunk of budget initially to maintain it, but I'm sure they view it as a stepping stone or bridge SLE.
https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-...
Rocky and SUSE Liberty Linux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, which has become more difficult.