I always been a RedHat boy, the first GNU/Linux distro I seriously used was a RedHat Linux 5.0 (please note I’m not talking about RedHat Enteprise Linux, I’m talking about the old RedHat Linux distribution, before RHEL was born) and since then I always tried to stick to the RedHat side of the Linux world, even now If I have to choose a distro I’ll choose Rocky Linux over Debian or Ubuntu.

When I started working on AWS many years ago I tried Amazon Linux 2, and It was good, more or less It was like CentOS 7 and everything was ok… then came Amazon Linux 2003.

I didn’t chose It, someone else did and passed the instance to me, and since the beginning something was not right…

You can’t use EPEL…

You can’t find a lot of RHEL/CentOS/Fedora/Rocky/Alma packages on it…

You can’t even run dnf-automatic or yum-cron to automatically install updates on a scheduled base… updates are shipped in batches and you have to update the whole OS with all the updated packages… manually.

And today I found that even the damn flippin’ cron do not work, you have to manually install it with

sudo yum install cronie -y
sudo systemctl enable crond.service

What on earth?!?!?!?!

No, seriously if you have to choose a RHEL based GNU/Linux distributio choose Fedora, CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, Oracle Linux but DO NOT CHOOSE AMAZON LINUX 2003…

Amazon Linux 2003 is the devil of GNU/Linux distros, probably one of the worst distros ever made.