Not worth it imo. You'll end up installing everything you use regularly from 3rd party repos (or building yourself) to get up to date features. Just use Fedora.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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These days, you also have the options of Flatpaks and Distrobox. Do not nearly as big a problem as previously. No need to build from source.
I mean, for most things, why even rely on EPEL when you can install something like Arch in Distrobox. A super stable base with totally up to date apps is a great combination.
We use Alma Linux at work and it's fine, I suppose. I see two main reasons why you'd choose an EL linux distro:
- You have (professional) software that officially supports it. RHEL's release model makes it an attractive target for proprietary software and many vendors choose to support it.
- You need/want very long support cycles. You can run 10-year-old software even though you probably shouldn't.
Apart from those, it's a competent distro, Red Hat know what they're doing. If you want the equivalent to an Ubuntu LTS / Debian in the Fedora world, it get's the job done. I quite like their approach of keeping the core OS stable while updating drivers, tools, and compilers (e.g., the kernel version number has very little meaning in RHEL).
Is the experience very different from Fedora?
Yes. the age of the core packages is very noticeable. The number of fully supported packages is also very small and you need to go to EPEL very quickly (at which point you're no longer getting enterprise support...). On the plus side, it's much more stable than Fedora in my experience.
Edit: My main recommendation for a stable distro would probably be Debian unless one of the above points applies.