CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox

FOSDEM 2025 CentOS Connect, the FOSDEM-adjacent meetup, delivered a few notable updates: Firefox is returning as a native package on CentOS, an immutable Stream variant is being explored, and AlmaLinux is doing things its own way.

Last year, The Reg FOSS desk talked to AlmaLinux project lead benny Vasquez about that project's internal upstream distro, AlmaLinux Kitten, and she suggested that to find out what's new in the world of the free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-alikes, we should attend CentOS Connect. This free event happened over the two days immediately preceding FOSDEM 2025, which means it overlapped the Open Source Policy Summit - we wrote about the 2023 edition of that event.

The event was strongly focused on the folks using and maintaining CentOS Stream and its relatives - or RHELatives as we like to call them - and there wasn't an awful lot here for those in the wider Linux community, which is fair enough, but there were some interesting snippets of news, such as an immutable variant of CentOS Stream and the return of a natively packaged version of the Firefox web browser.

CentOS Linux is no more but CentOS Stream is alive and well. Meta is a big user and co-sponsored the Connect event. If you use Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, for instance, you're probably indirectly using Stream. Stream 10 was released in mid-December before the RHEL 10 beta and closely followed the AlmaLinux 10 beta.

The Reg FOSS desk is a former member of staff at the now-IBM-subsidiary and speaks from personal experience when he says that Red Hat's Linux folks can have a somewhat parochial view of the Linux distribution world. From the lofty heights of its $34 billion valuation in 2018, everyone else in the Linux world looks very tiny down there on the ground. We've found that some people in the Red Hat-using world are remarkably unfamiliar with other distros, their build and installation tools such as the Koji build system, Kiwi image builder, and Bodhi packaging system. (I'm not sure if anyone at Red Hat knows or cares that there's been a distro called Bodhi Linux for some 15 years.)

A couple of years ago we spoke to the Rocky Linux team, who were very proud of their then-quite-new cloud-based build system Peridot, which reproduces some of the Red Hat build system in the cloud. They were very surprised to be told that SUSE and openSUSE already have just such a thing, the Open Build Service, and it can build packages for Debian, Ubuntu, and the RHELatives.

This broader discussion about build systems may have inspired the talk on AlmaLinux: the special derivative, from that team's engineering lead, Andrew Lukoshko. He explained how the team doesn't use Koji, Kiwi, and so on, but has its own system that uses tools such as PULP for artifact storage and Pungi image builder.

Like SUSE Linux Enterprise, RHEL itself is relatively tiny, with a small supported base of a few thousand packages. For instance, if you want a desktop, it's GNOME or nothing. This is why Canonical's announcement that it would offer an entire decade of updates for the 60,000 packages in its universe repository caused some excitement. If you want anything else on CentOS, you need to use the additional EPEL repositories, or install things using Flatpak. As of 2023, this includes LibreOffice. There were several talks about what is in EPEL, how to package for EPEL, and so on.

One thing you might want is a web browser. It's not trivial to add additional repositories, or subsystems like Flatpak, if you don't have a browser to look up how, and copy-and-paste the lengthy commands involved - see, for example, this anguished comment and the subsequent explanation. We've noted that it's not easy to install a web browser on Xubuntu Minimal.

Thus the news that Firefox 128 ESR, the current long-term supported release, was coming back to CentOS was met with applause. The browser might yet also be joined by Thunderbird - but probably not the GNOME Evolution mail client as well. It will make users' lives much easier if they can simply dnf install firefox.

There were several talks on the OKD project. Its GitHub page describes it thus:

In one of his talks, engineering manager Dennis Gilmore mentioned an unfamiliar distro in the Red Hat family: CentOS Stream CoreOS. This isn't available as a separate, independent project just yet, but it is mentioned on the CentOS Cloud page:

It's been about seven years since Red Hat bought CoreOS, after which it "sunset" its own Project Atomic immutable distros. Apart from immutable variants of Fedora, there has not been a lot else to show for the acquisition. OpenShift does contain Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, but you can't get it separately.

It seems to us that a free, open, community-driven immutable version of CentOS Stream CoreOS could potentially be of interest to a few people outside of OpenShift or OKD. We asked Gilmore if it was available as a product in its own right, and he replied that it wasn't, but if someone in the community wanted to make a standalone version, then there was no reason why it couldn't become so.

SUSE is still working on its immutable server distro, codenamed ALP, although we haven't seen any news for a while. Canonical has been maintaining its Ubuntu Core for over a decade now, the latest being Core 24 last June. It's not a general-purpose server OS, but it could be made into one. It would be interesting if Red Hat finally made a play in this game. ®