Slightly detached because of their processing/release process (Fedora X never quite matched to RHEL Y even if there was some derivation), but yes, Fedora is absolutely the alpha for RHEL. It gets changes, including breaking changes, on a fast track (IIRC, Fedora frequently goes toe-to-toe with Arch for having the most recent packages), has a 13-month lifecycle with a strong expectation that you'll `dnf system-upgrade` regularly, and doesn't shy away from pushing on tech that they believe to be desirable even if it's not (yet) widely used (Wayland, BTRFS, CGroupsV2).
> Did you consider RHEL to be a beta for CentOS previously?
Now that's an interesting point that actually makes me stop and consider:) It is true that previously CentOS could legitimately claim to be even more stable/slow-moving than RHEL. I think the distinction that I would make is that RHEL had its own betas that were called betas, and that each point release was frozen/stable until the next one came along, while Stream is explicitly unfrozen all the time. So yes, I suppose a person could have described RHEL as CentOS's beta, although probably only jokingly because it still had Red Hat supporting it and feature freezes to control changes.
Funny to read this because Fedora is definitely beta, because their distribution doesn't seem very stable. I switched away from Fedora because it seemed to break more than my Arch installation. There are a lot of things they are doing that no other distros are doing right now. Cgroups v2, for instance.
The benefit of Fedora was that they handled a lot of things that were a pain to configure. The biggest culprit being fonts. But now that TrueType patents have expired, and it's included in Arch automatically it's one less reason to use Fedora.
I think you're digging in the wrong place, and focusing on the label. This shouldn't be kicking fedora down. It has a place, as does stream.
The point is that with CentOS you expect a super stable release. Red Hat replaced that with what is clearly a less stable project. And as was said before, if you used CentOS, it's probably precisely because you want something super stable with long term support. Those are not the sorts of users who'll want to use Stream.
To me, Fedora is a desktop environment (my preferred one!) and absolutely an alpha/early-beta server option at best.
CentOS Stream seems like "Fedora, again" and does not do what CentOS did. And now, the willingness to blow up CentOS with so little warning means there is a massive trust deficit here.
There's a pretty big difference. While I'm very much not an expert on the RHEL QE process, my understanding is that Fedora is pretty much its own thing that is used to rebase RHEL on major revs. Whereas Stream is RHEL builds that have passed CI testing in the RHEL dev/test process.
Just trying to see how you define "beta"