What about Fedora LTS?

Fedora is a great distro, innovative, pushing hard etc. It has great software and great features. Unfortunately based on my experience it has new bugs as well. I like how Fedora does certain things but I prefer to run something like CentOS in my daily system, I prefer stability to new features. Now Fedora has spins, labs, core, containers, silverblue, many variants. Why not a Fedora LTS? Some would say CentOS but CentOS is still very short of many desktop packages. In CentOS 8 I could not find a software similar to dnfdragora, so my only option was the limited gnome-software and the command line. CentOS is made more usable for the average desktop user via Epel but then Epel is limited too. Epel does not have the breadth and amount of packages a regular Fedora distribution does. Or maybe what about CentOS becoming Fedora LTS and joining hands with Fedora? Maybe too much fragmentation is not good. Just my two cents.

I think that is indeed the answer you’ll mostly get. The CentOS-Fedora relation is a bit unique, one, because CentOS/Fedora are different distros rather than different versions of the same, two, CentOS is a very slow LTS, while Fedora is a very fast normal release, so the divergence is larger than elsewhere and three, because of the Fedora → RHEL → CentOS detour, i.e. CentOS strives to be free RHEL rather than Fedora LTS.

IMO, an actual Fedora LTS will never happen for a variety of reasons, and while there already is a lot of cooperation & interaction, between RHEL & Fedora especially, but there is certainly room for improvement in how CentOS and Fedora work together.

The developers know that. There are ongoing efforts to increase cooperation/interaction between the three. Right now, that is mainly manifested in a unifying of infrastructure and recently the introduction of ELN (Enterprise Linux Next) branches in Fedora’s repositories, meaning that the development version of RHEL/CentOS essentially moved from RHEL to Fedora. Neither will be immediately visible to the user, but will surely aid in closer alignment between them. It’s simply easier to cooperate if we all build on the same stuff.

In the meantime, the easiest way - both from the side of users and from the side of developers - to make CentOS more Fedora LTS-like is EPEL, so if you, as a user, are missing something in CentOS that Fedora has, the best course of action is to ask the Fedora maintainer of that package if they’d be willing to add it to EPEL, or - if you’d like to help out - offer to do so yourself.

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With a community-based distro and limited resources you can’t have the best from both worlds; On one hand the fast moving Fedora, and on the other hand a 10-year LTS Fedora. Do you know how much time and money that maintenance would require? It is either or… and I think it doesn’t matter, there are many stable LTS distros out there (CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian)… so no need to create yet another one.

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Fedora LTS ??
is this not referred to as Red Hat Enterprise Linux - Extended Life Cycle Support

fedora lts is the rhel but if you dont want to pay for some reason centos steam is a good option else rocky or alma is kind of 1 to 1 compatible and oracle linux is also a good alternative.

There are differing goals and targets for various distros.

I see 4 different things all based on the development work done in Fedora.
RHEL – a server distro and downstream of Fedora.
CentOS Stream – somewhat an intermediary distro between Fedora and RHEL
Rocky and Alma – both offshoots of what used to be CentOS. Rocky clearly states it intends to maintain version 8 until 2029 and version 9 until 2032.

Thus there are lots of LTS options within the Fedora/RH ecosystem, though fedora is the only one that is directly aimed at the average desktop user. The others are enterprise oriented.

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Both Rocky and Alma are based directly on RHEL source code according to their web sites.

I have just purchased a VPS & while my previous setup would have been debian, I have setup a Rocky Linux system. As I believe the LTS stability of RHEL is now available without the required subscription model! So now I just need to become a command line wizard, devops & sysadmin all in one!! :cold_sweat:
at least there’s a great community of folks out there in the Fedoraverse!
a current Fedora LTS thread

From what i see it would appear that rocky is more server oriented, while alma is server, but also providing for the desktop user. Both seem to be more in the LTS category since they claim to be downstream of RHEL.

slowroll competition to openSUSE slowroll experimental version like tumbleweed and leap no rolling release or LTS in the middle. gives more stability, but still on top end suff and updaes just little slower 2-3 months bigger update push and criticals instant since we all love security

LTS is about stability … Ubuntu LTS supports Intel, NVidia, ROS, … software frameworks that you can use for free but aimed for professional use. SUSE, Red Hat, Microsoft Windows Entreprise, Google Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, Workspace Enterprise have professional support needing subscription. Rocky Linux is about using enterprise grade OS not paying for professional use … Otherwise just use OpenSUSE, CentOS Stream, … Debian 12 is using kernel 6.1, GCC 12, …
Fedora is latest and greatest faster than Debian Sid, Fedora Rawhide can be fun …

The fun thing to do today is using Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA, IBM, AWS cloud cognitive services, Arduino Cloud … not free !