Details are still scarce, but SUSE Liberty Linux is preparing a new distribution as its replacement CentOS Linux. The new distribution will be a rebuild of CentOS 8 by SUSE, aiming for near-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 enters the game with her own reconstruction of it freely availabley Red Hat source code.
This particular distribution appeared instantly on the SUSE website overnight, and we do not yet have a trial 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 distribution using its own tools (Open Build Service). The new distribution userland will be developed by Red Hat's official Source RPM (SRPM), with the exception of the kernel. The kernel will come from SUSE's corporate SLE 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. So RHEL drivers and kernel modules will almost certainly not work. But the SLE ones will work.
We should expect support for systems only files selected by Red Hat. This means XFS instead of Btrf which SUSE prefers. The new distribution will come only on the x86-64 architecture, with no support for POWER or Arm systems.