[Espionage724]

Now I'm even more confused as to why RHEL's changes are this controversial :p

16 machines is more devices than I have in my house, and enterprise seems like they can just pay for RHEL. I'm also betting there's not some thorough verification process that would prevent you from running RHEL free on more than 16 machines (seems almost too easy, but just make multiple free accounts per-16 machines? RH I'm sure would be happier to have people running RHEL at all than intentionally seeking out free license violators)

[jzb]

Because Red Hat’s competitors have been stirring the pot and because people have become accustomed to a free RHEL and feel entitled to it.

[doubled112]

16 devices doesn’t cover everything I have at home, and managing the license(s) isn’t something I’m looking to do.

[BossingAround]

To be honest, if you need 20 licenses because of a home lab, I'm sure if you wrote to Red Hat, they'd probably provide some extra free (or nearly-free, like 50$ a year or something) licenses since your use case is home-related, not business-related.

That said, I can understand how one wouldn't want to do that. For a home lab, I'd say any distro is totally fine.

[Espionage724]

So you'd rather use some random fork of RHEL?

[doubled112]

For personal use I use Debian almost exclusively. Laptops, desktops, servers, VMs, Raspberry Pis, all of it.

Pre-Stream CentOS was never my preference, but I did spend some time running it to learn the RHEL way. The free licenses would fill that gap.

At work we run RHEL where we needed support and Alma where we don't. It was chosen for me. I'm watching to see how this plays out, but not incredibly concerned.

[kobalsky]

> Now I'm even more confused as to why RHEL's changes are this controversial :p

16 licenses is the proverbial tip.

we know what happens next.