This already raises a few questions:

• AlmaLinux, Rockylinux or Oracle Linux? They should be all nearly the same
• why not RHEL which is free for a bunch of machines?

I think CentOS Stream is way better for Desktop usage. RHEL has a release cycle of 5 years! This is way worse than Debian, which is always made fun of for being outdated, but its also really stable. I dont see why it should be even more stable.

I would honestly use CentOS stream which is probably similar to Debian, but has SELinux support.

The only supported Desktop is GNOME afaik. You can in theory run a modern Desktop through Distrobox or use EPEL to get others.

But then you are basically in Fedora territory, more stable packages but not officially supported. And I dont know what versions these Desktops have.

Then the question, what about atomic OSses like Fedora Atomic Desktops? These are even better for reliability.

Rpm-ostree could be adapted to CentOS Stream or also these RHEL clones. That sounds like a pretty good idea tbh, as the .spec files already exists, you just need to build it on COPR.

For atomic Debian there only are VanillaOS Orchid and EndlessOS.

EndlessOS seems to not do well, their installer is pretty broken and they are still using GNOME 41.5 while Debian 12 is on GNOME 43 since 8 months or so (GNOME got so much better in the last years, especially looks). So dont use it I guess. Also their website is quite a mess, relying on weird hosts to even download the .iso.

VanillaOS Orchid just did nothing when pressing “install” in a VM and is still beta.

Also rpm-ostree is way better than A/B root with a traditional package manager, as you have git for your OS, can reset, rebase, etc.

There is still a SIG (special interest group) for “atomic CentOS” but since all the CentOS sunsetting all their links are broken, the “project atomic” is replaced with Fedora CoreOS which I find very overcomplex and of course it is way less stable.

It should be pretty easy to build an atomic variant of CentOS Stream or the others

• use the container image from quay.io
• add rpm-ostree (they even have the package in their repo but no idea how updated that is)
• add the latest LTS kernel from CentOS Stream, Almalinux, RockyLinux or wherever from; and all the other needed packages workstation, server, virt-host, …)
• remove dnf and yum

I wonder if this could be done easily with the bluebuild framework.

AlmaLinux is effectively a downstream of RHEL, so it inherits a lot of RHEL’s pros and cons. I think, from a technical perspective, it makes a lot of sense for professional applications. It has a rock solid base OS that only changes rarely, which has lead to widespread support among professional (commercial) software. On top of that you get more regular updates to hardware support and (some) applications. You also get very long support times, which can make sense for some use cases.

On the hand, this model certainly also has its downsides. Towards the end of the life cycle, the packages get very old, especially the base OS (e.g. RHEL 7, which goes EOL this year, ships with gcc version 4.8). If you care about having the latest and greatest packages, this is not a distro for you. It’s also not clear if Red Hat will try to further crack down on their downstream distros…

Overall, I think it’s a good choice for a professional environment, where you don’t need bleeding edge packages. Some commercial software also doesn’t give you a lot of other options. For personal use, I’d probably look for another distro, unless you’re looking for a very slow update cycle.

Unless you need to use software that only targets RHEL, I would not use AlmaLinux as a desktop. The desktop itself will get very stale. Apps can be upgraded with Flatpaks but the DE and dev packages are harder.