CentOS is the downstream of Fedora and upstream of the extremely stable RHEL.
Debian is stable and has a release cycle of 2 years, RHEL uses 5 years. So using RHEL on a desktop is overkill.
But unlike all the hate about RedHat converting CentOS to CentOS Stream, I think this makes it a very very good candidate for a normal workstation!
It has EPEL and COPR repo support, so you can get tons of external packages, desktops etc. You can also just clone COPR repos you like, or ask the maintainers to add CentOS Stream to the builds.
I would not want to use a “traditionally” package-managed distro anymore though, it is just not reliable enough for me.
rpm-ostree is perfect, Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea, …), uBlue, Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora. Even a COSMIC image is there.
rpm-ostree needs 2 things:
- An ostree remote OR OCI container registry, to pull the main image
- Optional, for layering: traditional RPM package repositories
The repos are already there, but an OCI image is needed. There are OCI images of CentOS stream.
But uBlues framework can not just be used, as they download the image from Fedora, chroot into it and use the builtin tools. This requires the presence of rpm-ostree and a kernel, which are both missing in the CentOS Stream image.
So, the question:
Do you know how to manipulate OCI images, to pull it in, add packages from the CentOS repos (kernel) and COPR (rpm-ostree), do some changes and build an OCI image again?
There are ostree-enabled OCI containers of centos if you know where to look. :D
This should be enough until they start publishing official ones, never used it:
https://quay.io/repository/centos-bootc/centos-bootc-dev?tab=tags