I would wait a bit to see how this shakes out before raising the alarm. I'm waiting to see what Alma/Rocky do, as well as holding out a small amount of hope that RH and others will agree to something.

Yeah, we were late on CentOS 8, and had just put 3-4 systems and VMs into production when the Stream announcement hit, which made us stop in our tracks. We eventually accepted Rocky and started actually getting newer systems in place once 9 was out, so we just jumped to using 9 and in-place upgraded our Rocky 8 systems to 9.

We're only about a quarter migrated though, so still have a few hundred Centos 7 boxes to eventually get off of, and we'll see if that ends up being Rocky or something else.

I will note that this episode of The FOSS Pod[1] with a Debian lead actually made me think switching to Debian itself way back in the past (since we've been doing this for almost three decades now) would have been a safer path. I highly recommend it, it cleared up a few misconceptions I had as a Red Hat/CentOS user about what Debian is really attempting and why, and how that would fit with our needs. For example why their goal of pure open source licenses isn't an ideological choice, but a choice to benefit the Debian ecosystem, since the goal is to make downstream distros of Debian easy and without problem (e.g. no extra legal review needed based on licensed included).

1: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/debian-linux-with-jona...

Same here, we still have 2 or 3 CentOS 8 to Rocky conversions to go from before we even started replacing Ubuntu!

I have to admit, while I share a lot of the values of Debian, I never really liked the product. Especially the apt package mangler, err, manager. They've also carried some Debian in-house patches that really caused me some grief in the past.

I've started running FreeBSD on my personal servers. Unfortunately it's not an option at work.

I've never really Debian it in the past, so can't comment on the reality, just what I've heard, and even my Ubuntu experience is lacking. I'm running it as a virtual desktop now, but I try to keep my use of it to an MUA, web browser and terminals so I don't have to spend the time to become familiar with it, given it's got no other use for me so far.

Our director loves FreeBSD, and we actually use it for firewalls, so it's not a spectacularly hard sell. I'm not sure it's significantly different from the problems of Stream to make it worthwhile, at least not without some external patching and support entity in addition, but it's been a long time since I looked at the specifics of their packaging and ports systems. I don't actually mind something like Stream for a personal server actually. It's just when trying to manage a fleet in the tens and hundreds when it becomes a real liability and increased possible admin support load IMO.

Asking from curiosity, what is the problem you had with apt? I'm using Debian close to 20 years now, and liked Debian and .deb a lot, more then RPM even.

Honestly, having built some packages and maintaining a derivative provided me more insight than a regular user, but even before that I was using Debian without any problems.

BTW, Ubuntu is not Debian with a different UI. They're pretty different on fundamental things, even.

A broken pre/post install script (often the problem is not expecting the current state of your machine) that fails while running `apt-get install -f` it the common culprit.

Just curious, why didn't you migrate from Ubuntu to Debian? Wouldn't that have been a smaller change?

Because we already had a solid base of RockyLinux VMs, so standardizing made sense. And I personally dislike apt / Debian.