TheWoozy

50k lines is, IMHO, way too large for a bash script. I’d switch to python long before before that. Bash is primarily an *interactive shell. Bash has a lot of nice scripting capabilities (that few are aware of, let alone use) but its primary use is not as a programing language. As far as standard libraries go: sed, awk, grep, curl, netcat, etc… provide plenty of advanced capabilities. That’s the Unix philosophy, lots of small utilities that each do one thing well and that work with streams of bytes as i/o. Tie them together with a powerful shell, and an ordinary user can do quite a lot without “programming”. Is the Unix philosophy perfect? No. Has it proved to be the most flexible and successful compute environment developed for over 50 years? Yes.

My company runs thousands of centos VMs. We cannot exist if we have to license rhel. We’ve been working on switching to Alma. We may have to look elsewhere for a free distro that has robust SeLinux support.

I have one major quibble with your analysis. It is this: Redhat no longer exists as an organization. Redhat is merely a trademark of IBM. You can’t defend IBM’s actions based on Redhat’s history. That was a different company, and a different era.