Details are still scarce, but SUSE Liberty Linux is preparing a new distribution to replace CentOS Linux. The new distribution will be a remake of CentOS 8 by SUSE, aiming for almost perfect compatibility with RHEL 8.
Ever since Red Hat stopped it CentOS Linux and replaced it with CentOS Stream, and RHEL-based distributions changed. So far we have distributions SoulLinux and Rocky linux. So SUSE comes into play with its own redesign of the freely available Red Hat source code.
This particular distro appeared briefly on the SUSE website overnight, and we don't have one yet test version. But let's see what we know so far.
When released the Liberty Linux distribution will be equivalent to the current version of Red Hat - RHEL 8.5 - and compatible with packages from Red Hat EPEL repos.
SUSE develops the distribution using its own tools (Open Build Service). The userland of the new distribution will be developed by the official ones Source Red Hat RPM (SRPM), excluding the kernel. The kernel will come from SUSE's SLE enterprise distribution, which currently uses version 15 SP3, but was compiled using Red Hat compatible settings.
So the Liberty Linux distribution will be released with kernel 5.3.18. This is of course much newer than the 4.18 kernel that RHEL 8.5 uses. That's why drivers and RHEL kernel modules will almost certainly not work. But the SLE ones will work.
We will have to wait support only for file systems selected by Red Hat. This means XFS instead of Btrf which SUSE prefers. The new distribution will only come on the x86-64 architecture, with no support for POWER or Arm systems.