Zero need. For old FOSS loving Red Hat, it was CentOS. There were no need for additional forks (really, though Oracle certainly wanted their own “control”).
openSUSE exists, it’s free, it’s got SLE, it upgrades license wise to SLE if you want.
Again, unlike what Red Hat has done in destroying that pathway, there’s still an enterprise path going from openSUSE (free SLE) to SLE.
If you want SLE for free today, use openSUSE Leap. Can you clone it? Sure. But again, because it’s available, there’s probably not a great reason to do so.
Yeah, I agree… I was just curious but you’re right, with openSUSE there’s no need for SLE derivatives.
As for Red Hat, IBM buying them out was the worst thing that could happen. IBM ruins anything they touch. That comes from personal experience and friends that currently work at Red Hat.
“Linarite” would be “a regular old fashioned release desktop distribution”, though with a smaller package selection than is provided by Leap now. It would be based on a SUSE project known as “Granite”; there is little public information available regarding this project, but it seems to be the ALP-derived product that will be the closest to a traditional enterprise server distribution.
“Slowroll”, instead, is a rolling distribution based on the existing openSUSE Tumbleweed offering (which is not built on enterprise packages and can be expected to continue without big changes), but with a stronger focus on stability. Packages would move from Tumbleweed to Slowroll when they have shown, over a period of time, that they are unlikely to introduce new problems. Slowroll, Brown said, is “an attempt to provide something less scary than full speed Tumbleweed”.
I like the idea of Slowroll but I see the dilemma that Richard points out in this email:
I suppose we COULD just take the approach of having Slowroll carrying ‘known issues’ until the impacted packages pull from Tumbleweed
But I think that’s not exactly an ethical way of distributing software - if that’s the route we go down, we’d need to make it very clear that Tumbleweed would be the objectively more secure, better maintained offering of the Project.
For the alternative see the link but I definitely agree that it will be challenging to find people to make patches that will be thrown away “the next roll”.
“Linarite” is based on “Granite” and “Granite” will be too late for a Leap replacement as I understand it.
I remember there was a question raised if users would like a release of Leap 15.7 to fill that gap. Though apparently that option is no longer on the table anymore.