10 ms·

Rocky Linux releases its first release candidate

149 points by sparcpile 5y ago

FooBarWidget 5y ago
I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Linux succeed where CentOS "failed"? How would Rocky Linux get resources to sustain it?
- marmaduke 5y ago
  Didn’t it fail because RH chose so? C8 certainly works fine, if boring.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
    - Tsiklon 5y ago
      Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7. AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
      - mrweasel 5y ago
        I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.
        yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.
        jacobr1 5y ago
        The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.
        mrweasel 5y ago
        They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money. So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
        sparc24 5y ago
        Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD. RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST. Just stop talking.
      - chessmango 5y ago
        Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there
    - kbenson 5y ago
      > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important. > It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky. Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support. I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
    - mhitza 5y ago
      > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release. Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand. But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
      - pfranz 5y ago
        Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases 6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.
- mjw1007 5y ago
  Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then. It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.
- beermonster 5y ago
  > I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”. I wish Rocky Linux the same success!
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival. I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it. Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
    - orev 5y ago
      CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
      - dralley 5y ago
        MoviePass had a large number of subscribers. It's very easy to be successful if you're giving something away for free and ignore sustainability.
    - beermonster 5y ago
      CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried. Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset. But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
      - mrweasel 5y ago
- orev 5y ago
  The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors. The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
  - GNOMES 5y ago
    Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
    - hollerith 5y ago
      Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing! (Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
      - kodah 5y ago
        Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.
        hollerith 5y ago
        If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.
        kodah 5y ago
        Fair enough
        mickotron 5y ago
marmaduke 5y ago
We run an HPC cluster on CentOS 8 and looking at moving to Rocky but I wonder if we shouldn’t just jump to Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. The main thing keeping us is that kickstart works pretty well over PXE with dnsmasq and I never found good docs for the equivalents elsewhere.
- bombcar 5y ago
  If you're tied to software that is used on RHEL or release in sync with RHEL I'd say stick with CentOS-like distributions - but if you're not I'd say that moving to Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem that bad of an option.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    If you need LTS would Debian not be a better choice for servers?
    - dralley 5y ago
      Debian and Ubuntu have the same LTS policies, but Ubuntu has the option of paid "extended LTS". I won't comment on the experience of using Ubuntu vs. Debian on servers because I don't have any
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The main advantage with Ubuntu is “everyone uses it” so there’s almost certainly a setup for it. Debian may have a bit more hoops to jump through.
- dnautics 5y ago
  PXE for Ubuntu is a nightmare compared to centos, but it is doable. It took me about four months (on and off with other responsibilities) to figure it out... It's been a while but iirc the biggest trick is to use the "legacy" installer iso.
  - secabeen 5y ago
    Yeah, I have a PXE install system for Ubuntu too, built on the text mode installer. They are really pushing people to use MAAS, for a while the legacy installer for 20.04 wasn't released, and I thought I'd have to change, but it's out now. We'll see if they still have it for 22.04. :fingers crossed:
settrans 5y ago
This looks awesome -- congrats to the team on the landmark milestone. I've been eagerly anticipating the release since their initial announcement. I am left to wonder how seamless this migration will be in practice. I'm a heavy user of, for example, zfs-kmod, and would be thrilled to learn that I won't suddenly be on the hook for coordinating dkms build shenanigans across my ZoL machines. Bonus points if they offer a direct upgrade path from CentOS -- although I'm not holding my breath on this one.
mijoharas 5y ago
For anyone else that was missing context, there is an about section on the wiki[0] > Rocky Linux is a community enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux, now that CentOS has shifted direction. [0] https://wiki.rockylinux.org/ https://wiki.rockylinux.org/
- Jellyspice 5y ago
  What is enterprise operating system anyway?
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    RedHat
  - Tsiklon 5y ago
    For the purposes of avoiding trademark infringement all RHEL clones go out of their way to avoid mentioning Red Hat, thusly Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all derived from its sources tend to get lumped together as “Enterprise Linux”
    - mimsee 5y ago
      Sure, but what makes Rocky "enterprise"? Is it just marketing or can everything be "enterprise"? Is Windows not "enterprise"?
      - Karunamon 5y ago
        Being based on Red Hat by way of CentOS, who's full name initial-ized as RHEL is "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"
      - kingaillas 5y ago
        To me, being "enterprise" means shipping/supporting running enterprise functions on the OS. So things like network information services, databases, perhaps giving options of filesystems that can handle extremely large sizes, cluster support, added support from the vendor, etc. Stuff that a typical desktop user probably won't run or use. Maybe they can if they really wanted to, but not the common use case. >Is Windows not "enterprise"? Funny you ask when Microsoft literally sells a version of Windows called "Windows Enterprise". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare Find the differences between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Enterprise and that may help you understand what makes Rocky Linux also enterprise.
portmanteaufu 5y ago
The home page[1] bends over backwards not to use the name "Red Hat", which renders the FAQ weirdly obtuse. CentOS, which used to be downstream of Red Hat, has changed its strategy. Rocky Linux is looking to replace CentOS. [1] https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/
- fipar 5y ago
  That's to avoid trademark infringement. It used to be the same case with CentOS early on. Check out the "CentOS Overview" section in this version, with references to "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor": https://web.archive.org/web/20050322010830/https://www.centos.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050322010830/https://www.cento...
  - user3939382 5y ago
    IMHO the proper purpose of trademarks should be to prevent consumer confusion. From that perspective, it’s absurd to have to dance around mentioning a trademark in a context where you’re explicitly stating that your product is different from it.
    - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
      Tell that to Red Hat's lawyers [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20071114044958/http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=66 https://web.archive.org/web/20071114044958/http://www.centos...
      - protomyth 5y ago
        I rather doubt IBM's lawyers are more friendly about trademark use.
        selectodude 5y ago
        Better safe than to wake up the Nazgul.
sneak 5y ago
"Changed its strategy" is such a weird euphemism. Why does the founder of a project feel obligated to repeat the ass-covering euphemism of the corporation that fucked up his last project?
- tux1968 5y ago
  Suspect he's just being prudent. No reason to have any interaction at all with the IBM legal team.
jorl17 5y ago
One of our clients pushed us toward AlmaLinux instead of CentOS 7. At the time, we vaguely suggested Rocky Linux, but noted we were kind of still waiting for the future (hence our suggestion of going with CentOS 7 and migrating later to the "true successor" of CentOS). What is the HN community's perception of this? Is AlmaLinux a good choice? Do you believe Rocky Linux will succeed?
- mrweasel 5y ago
  I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. My guess is that supporting all the companies who do not want to pay Redhat, for free, is going to push developers way pretty quickly. Even if I’m wrong I’d still want to see at least two or three solid release before using either in production. Just use Redhat or switch to Ubuntu. Then you can re-evaluate in five tears time.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. While it's possible that CentOS would have failed (I'm not sure slow initial releases actually indicate that), it also wasn't the only popular clone of RHEL in popular use. Scientific Linux (developed by FermiLab) was also popular and in fairly wide use. I doubt Red Hat would have made the change to CentOS that spurred all this if Scientific Linux hadn't decided not to continue and just use CentOS instead in 2019, because instead of a "crap, we have to start a new distro to provide what CentOS did" movement there would have been a much quicker and easier mass exodus to Scientific Linux.
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      You might be right, there was not stopping Redhat from effectively killing CentOS anymore. I still don’t want to build anything new on an distro that have still to prove they can maintain the project for two or three release.
    - CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
      The Scientific Linux team decided to not make a Scientific Linux 8, and instead switch over to CentOS 8[0]. Note this was announced prior to the announcement about CentOS 8 going away. CERN et al are still deciding what to do[1]. [0]: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE;11d6001.1904 https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX... [1]: https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy
Tsiklon 5y ago
Congratulations to the Rocky Linux team. I hope this is a sign of things to come
Tepix 5y ago
In terms of speed it looks as if Oracle was the first to get 8.4 of their RHEL clone out of the door, Alma Linux came second and RockyLinux is still at 8.3 I'm optimistic that they will get faster!
GNOMES 5y ago
I understand the desire to stick with the 10yrs of updates model, but it seems outdated with how fast things evolve. I am still waiting for Redhat to bring some details on how Stream will work long term. We need to know what packages will be unstable. People seem to be held up that Redhat releases will be taken from Stream, making it a "beta" of things to come instead of a free RH. I personally see this no different than Fedora > CentOS release cycle. I welcome newer features hitting our enterprise boxes sooner than later. I have read that it's also not a true rolling release, and instead will have minor stop gap channel releases along the way. Unless there is another big shake up like init vs systemD, it will be excellent to have an enterprise grade rolling release option for long lived (non-cattle) servers. Updating our fleet from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 was painful... Currently moved most of my Dev servers to Stream, and I am excluding a few packages from rolling with DNF-Automatic. Will this stay supported?
- dralley 5y ago
  CentOS Stream is rolling between minor releases, not between major releases. So e.g. a CentOS Stream 8 system won't roll over to CentOS Stream 9. I do believe they're working on making major version upgrades easier, but they would still not be automatic. None of the packages should be "unstable" barring any major bugs, (or maybe proprietary kernel modules that expect a very specific kernel version).
- cpach 5y ago
  IMHO: For those who want more frequent upgrades, then I would say a container-based solution is a good fit. Then the container don’t need to care if the underlying host has very old packages.
xaduha 5y ago
ISOs are a bare minimum of course, but what about official container images? Personally I'd like to see how it works with existing package repos that are out there. EDIT: tried unofficial image and it seems you can use stuff from mirror.centos.org if you mimic Centos by modifying /etc/dnf/vars/contentdir and /etc/dnf/vars/cloudsigdist. Use --nogpgcheck if necessary.
rockii2 5y ago
This was released back at the end of April. https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-8-3-rc1-release/ https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-8-3-rc1-release/
germ 5y ago
Good to see this project moving along, and if the team is monitoring this, give Brian a smack from me :P
INTPenis 5y ago
I'm responsible for fairly critical infrastructure and I've been putting all my bets on RHEL/CentOS these last 7 years. So my plan is to just sit back and watch how all this develops until 2023. Use RHEL when possible, Fedora or CentOS 7. Worst case maybe CentOS Stream. But there is no rush. Just sit back and let time decide which of these new contenders looks the best after 2 years.
- stinkytaco 5y ago
  Is RHEL compatibility a must? At this point it feels like the only community solution that has a long term track record is Debian.
  - indigodaddy 5y ago
    There is a whole smorgasbord of entrenched application servers/software that are targeted mainly at the RHEL ecosystem. These would have a very difficult time transitioning to non-RHEL.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    I have government contractors specify versions of Red Hat and they will not support other distributions. Of course, these vendors also specify versions of Windows Server that Microsoft recommends you no longer run.
  - INTPenis 5y ago
    Yes, as others have pointed out already. Partly you have enterprise software from big vendors like Dell or Alcatel that is packaged for RHEL. You have hardware vendors like Dell and HPE who only offer support for supported OS. And yes I know CentOS is not a supported OS but its binary compatibility with RHEL meant you always had the option of migrating it to RHEL and get support. Also I have government clients who require SLA with support contracts on the systems. In those cases, given the arguments above, including years of experience, RHEL has more weight than Canonical or Suse. And besides all that, I'm actually a SElinux fanboy. I've had a lot of upgrade issues on Debian in the past and some clients even require certain yum features like history and rollback for patching. That said, I tend to use whatever is the right tool. I tend to look at how a service is designed to decide which distro to use. Of course I prefer homogenous environments but for example I'd rather put a stable CentOS as a webfront/TLS terminator and a bleeding edge Fedora as an application server for things like Node or Python. So in the future I would not rule out using Debian Stable as web front instead.
jb1991 5y ago
let’s hope the release isn’t rocky
forvelin 5y ago
We jumped off the CentOS boat after their statement and switched to OpenSuSe, no regrets so far, smooth sailing.
throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement. It's hard to get community support for projects that are business-focused. A project that is very general-purpose can get quite a few volunteers or donations. But if businesses are the primary users, the project often gets little to no support from those businesses, and very infrequently any contributed code or support. Getting my own company to donate to an OSS project that they heavily depend on is like pulling teeth. Which is ridiculous, because without that project they'd be paying a lot more for proprietary software!
- throwslkjlkja 5y ago
  I mean that kind of defeats the point of the effort and FOSS in general. If you need to pay you just buy RedHat. CentOS reached ubiquity by being free. Many large corporations already have competent system admins managing large installations/clusters that RedHat offered nothing worth purchasing over CentOS. Another approach to support is probably better rather than becoming RedHat 0.1
  - throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
    I used to support a corporate CentOS fork for years. I think I built something like 10,000 custom packages over several releases. If I found a bug and wanted to submit a code fix, I couldn't just submit it, because corporate wouldn't allow us to "release intellectual property". If I wanted to donate money I had to do it from my own wallet, because the company wouldn't approve the expense. But if our only legal option (given our size) was to pay one flat fee for infinite installs, or one flat fee per N nodes or something, the company would have approved that, because we needed to use something RHEL-like. If it's totally free, the company won't help at all. I think a few large companies could probably provide most of the funding necessary for the project, and still be ridiculously cheaper than RHEL. I'd only do this for business-focused projects, because of the tendency for those "users" not to contribute anything back. FOSS only thrives when people contribute. Otherwise you're a one-man software welfare program.
djhaskin987 5y ago
Frankly, since my company is pushing hard for a move away from the data center, we're really not talking about moving from CentOS 7 to e.g. Rocky any more anyway; we're talking about moving from CentOS 7 to Amazon Linux 2.

149 points by sparcpile 5y ago

I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it. Rocky Linux is founded by the CentOS founder. Why will Rocky Linux succeed where CentOS "failed"? How would Rocky Linux get resources to sustain it?

marmaduke 5y ago
Didn’t it fail because RH chose so? C8 certainly works fine, if boring.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky.
  - Tsiklon 5y ago
    Amazon Linux 2 is built on CentOS 7. AWS are a sponsor of Rocky Linux
    - mrweasel 5y ago
      I guess they’re kinda forced to. Switch to Ubuntu or Debian for Amazon Linux 3 would be weird, but perhaps a smart choice.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        They could do their own Fedora downstream, or jump to openSUSE for a different stable RPM distro.
      - jacobr1 5y ago
        The could just do their own RHEL fork, which would make Amazon Linux a peer to rocky instead of a downstream.
        mrweasel 5y ago
        They could have done that from the start, like Oracle, but they choose not to for a reason, most likely to save money. So now they either have to support Rocky Linux, and hope others do to, or pay the full cost of maintaining a RHEL compatible distro.
        sparc24 5y ago
        Looking at all your comments in this thread and you really don't know what you are talking about. Just spreading FUD. RHEL7 is the upstream for AL2 and there is a LOT of heavy lifting done by AWS. Newer kernel, newer toolchain, newer glibc. They do live patching. They actually test all sorts of workloads before even a minor errata update. They took OpenSSL 1.0.2 through FIPS validation with NIST. Just stop talking.
    - chessmango 5y ago
      Don't think this is the case. It's downstream of RHEL but with a bunch of liberties, so CentOS/Rocky doesn't change much there
  - kbenson 5y ago
    > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. A slow initial release and dying on the vine are two completely separate things. There's significant overlap in time between major distro releases, and while many users of CentOS were excited about getting newer versions, it was usually not imperative and all involved would likely agree that making sure existing releases continue to have timely updates for security and other things was more important. > It remains to be seen if the cloud companies will find a CentOS-like OS important enough to fund the development of things like Rocky. Whether cloud companies or not, there are a few ways forward now that weren't really considered previously. CentOS always had a somewhat tacit agreement with Red Hat to not overtly compete with Red Hat's revenue stream. i.e. Don't sell support, if advanced help is needed refer them to Red Hat for a license and support. I would say the relationships now are a tad more adversarial. Asking for money in more direct manners may now be more feasible. Even without that, I do think the cloud providers can easily fund one or more of these projects enough. The amount of money even one could spend to ensure the staffing of one of these projects is less than a rounding error in their operating budget, and given how often I suspect CentOS was chosen as the deployed OS in a way that makes their total cost numbers reflected back to a CTO look less, a very good investment for them.
  - mhitza 5y ago
    > Before RH took over CentOS it was pretty much dying on the vine, releases were getting VERY slow, etc. Remind me again, how long did it take RedHat to publish CentOS 8 images out to cloud providers or virtualbox? I think it was the very least 6 months behind the RedHat 8 release. Only started using CentOS at 7, so not sure how much they used to lag behind releases beforehand. But I've also had a dozen quality issues with RedHat software and services since they've been assimilated by IBM; so there's room for plenty of surprises.
    - pfranz 5y ago
      Wikipedia has both dates and the delay for each version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS#CentOS_releases 6.0 had a 242 day delay--I never really paid attention to why, but that was a very noticeable lag compared to their previous release schedule.
mjw1007 5y ago
Seven years is quite a long time in this area. It's possible that running exactly the CentOS-in-2014 model would work now even if it didn't then. It's also possible that in 2014 CentOS would have found other ways to remain viable if Red Hat hadn't stepped in.
beermonster 5y ago
> I don't get it. CentOS "failed" because there were not enough community resources to sustain it CentOS was a success story and that’s not why it “failed”. I wish Rocky Linux the same success!
- mrweasel 5y ago
  How was it a success story? Sure many used it, but the project wasn’t successful in terms of long term survival. I think CentOS had failed had Redhat not maintained it. Hopefully Rocky Linux will have better luck and more community involvement. It is likely, given the number of companies that have come to depend on CentOS, but I would not use Rocky Linux in production for critical system in the next two to five years.
  - orev 5y ago
    CentOS is used on a huge number of severs. That success became a threat the RedHat/IBM, as they were not getting customers signing up for their paid offerings. Hence, CentOS was killed off.
    - dralley 5y ago
      MoviePass had a large number of subscribers. It's very easy to be successful if you're giving something away for free and ignore sustainability.
  - beermonster 5y ago
    CentOS was huge in the cloud. Run by admins that want to config and forget. That 10 years support is nice. Boring and bullet proof is a feature (look at Debian). RedHat were a large contributor and also provided funding. When they pulled the plug the project didn’t survive and admins around the world cried. Hopefully Rocky wont suffer the same fate being supported by the community from the outset. But I might wait a bit before trying it :)
    - mrweasel 5y ago
orev 5y ago
The “failure” of the CentOS community is really related to the nature of the distro. As they aimed to be a fully compatible clone of RHEL, there’s not much you can allow in terms of community contribution to packages, etc,. Those kind of restrictions don’t lend themselves well to forming a vibrant group of contributors. The main area that was lacking are the other resources, like wiki, forums, and other docs. That’s one area where criticism is warranted. I always wince when I have to go to the Arch wiki to figure out how to set something up in CentOS.
- GNOMES 5y ago
  Only issue I have with using the Arch wiki (really the best Nix only wiki) to troubleshoot CentOS is due old versions in CentOS. CentOS seemed to mainly backport security fixes to older versions, so often flags or features of commands don't apply.
  - hollerith 5y ago
    Your use of "Nix" to mean Unix (if that is what you are doing) is confusing! (Nix is a package manager for Linux.)
    - kodah 5y ago
      Nix is also code for Linux and Unix when speaking broadly. It's a nebulous term.
      - hollerith 5y ago
        If he/she had written, "*nix", then I would have caught his/her meaning right away.
        kodah 5y ago
        Fair enough
        mickotron 5y ago

marmaduke 5y ago

We run an HPC cluster on CentOS 8 and looking at moving to Rocky but I wonder if we shouldn’t just jump to Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. The main thing keeping us is that kickstart works pretty well over PXE with dnsmasq and I never found good docs for the equivalents elsewhere.

bombcar 5y ago
If you're tied to software that is used on RHEL or release in sync with RHEL I'd say stick with CentOS-like distributions - but if you're not I'd say that moving to Ubuntu LTS doesn't seem that bad of an option.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  If you need LTS would Debian not be a better choice for servers?
  - dralley 5y ago
    Debian and Ubuntu have the same LTS policies, but Ubuntu has the option of paid "extended LTS". I won't comment on the experience of using Ubuntu vs. Debian on servers because I don't have any
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The main advantage with Ubuntu is “everyone uses it” so there’s almost certainly a setup for it. Debian may have a bit more hoops to jump through.
dnautics 5y ago
PXE for Ubuntu is a nightmare compared to centos, but it is doable. It took me about four months (on and off with other responsibilities) to figure it out... It's been a while but iirc the biggest trick is to use the "legacy" installer iso.
- secabeen 5y ago
  Yeah, I have a PXE install system for Ubuntu too, built on the text mode installer. They are really pushing people to use MAAS, for a while the legacy installer for 20.04 wasn't released, and I thought I'd have to change, but it's out now. We'll see if they still have it for 22.04. :fingers crossed:

settrans 5y ago

This looks awesome -- congrats to the team on the landmark milestone. I've been eagerly anticipating the release since their initial announcement. I am left to wonder how seamless this migration will be in practice. I'm a heavy user of, for example, zfs-kmod, and would be thrilled to learn that I won't suddenly be on the hook for coordinating dkms build shenanigans across my ZoL machines. Bonus points if they offer a direct upgrade path from CentOS -- although I'm not holding my breath on this one.

mijoharas 5y ago

For anyone else that was missing context, there is an about section on the wiki[0] > Rocky Linux is a community enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux, now that CentOS has shifted direction. [0] https://wiki.rockylinux.org/ https://wiki.rockylinux.org/

Jellyspice 5y ago
What is enterprise operating system anyway?
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  RedHat
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  For the purposes of avoiding trademark infringement all RHEL clones go out of their way to avoid mentioning Red Hat, thusly Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all derived from its sources tend to get lumped together as “Enterprise Linux”
  - mimsee 5y ago
    Sure, but what makes Rocky "enterprise"? Is it just marketing or can everything be "enterprise"? Is Windows not "enterprise"?
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Being based on Red Hat by way of CentOS, who's full name initial-ized as RHEL is "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"
    - kingaillas 5y ago
      To me, being "enterprise" means shipping/supporting running enterprise functions on the OS. So things like network information services, databases, perhaps giving options of filesystems that can handle extremely large sizes, cluster support, added support from the vendor, etc. Stuff that a typical desktop user probably won't run or use. Maybe they can if they really wanted to, but not the common use case. >Is Windows not "enterprise"? Funny you ask when Microsoft literally sells a version of Windows called "Windows Enterprise". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare Find the differences between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Enterprise and that may help you understand what makes Rocky Linux also enterprise.

portmanteaufu 5y ago

The home page[1] bends over backwards not to use the name "Red Hat", which renders the FAQ weirdly obtuse. CentOS, which used to be downstream of Red Hat, has changed its strategy. Rocky Linux is looking to replace CentOS. [1] https://rockylinux.org/ https://rockylinux.org/

fipar 5y ago
That's to avoid trademark infringement. It used to be the same case with CentOS early on. Check out the "CentOS Overview" section in this version, with references to "a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor": https://web.archive.org/web/20050322010830/https://www.centos.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050322010830/https://www.cento...
- user3939382 5y ago
  IMHO the proper purpose of trademarks should be to prevent consumer confusion. From that perspective, it’s absurd to have to dance around mentioning a trademark in a context where you’re explicitly stating that your product is different from it.
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    Tell that to Red Hat's lawyers [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20071114044958/http://www.centos.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=66 https://web.archive.org/web/20071114044958/http://www.centos...
    - protomyth 5y ago
      I rather doubt IBM's lawyers are more friendly about trademark use.
      - selectodude 5y ago
        Better safe than to wake up the Nazgul.

sneak 5y ago

"Changed its strategy" is such a weird euphemism. Why does the founder of a project feel obligated to repeat the ass-covering euphemism of the corporation that fucked up his last project?

tux1968 5y ago
Suspect he's just being prudent. No reason to have any interaction at all with the IBM legal team.

jorl17 5y ago

One of our clients pushed us toward AlmaLinux instead of CentOS 7. At the time, we vaguely suggested Rocky Linux, but noted we were kind of still waiting for the future (hence our suggestion of going with CentOS 7 and migrating later to the "true successor" of CentOS). What is the HN community's perception of this? Is AlmaLinux a good choice? Do you believe Rocky Linux will succeed?

mrweasel 5y ago
I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. My guess is that supporting all the companies who do not want to pay Redhat, for free, is going to push developers way pretty quickly. Even if I’m wrong I’d still want to see at least two or three solid release before using either in production. Just use Redhat or switch to Ubuntu. Then you can re-evaluate in five tears time.
- kbenson 5y ago
  > I’d say “neither”. CentOS would have fail had Redhat not taken over. While it's possible that CentOS would have failed (I'm not sure slow initial releases actually indicate that), it also wasn't the only popular clone of RHEL in popular use. Scientific Linux (developed by FermiLab) was also popular and in fairly wide use. I doubt Red Hat would have made the change to CentOS that spurred all this if Scientific Linux hadn't decided not to continue and just use CentOS instead in 2019, because instead of a "crap, we have to start a new distro to provide what CentOS did" movement there would have been a much quicker and easier mass exodus to Scientific Linux.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    You might be right, there was not stopping Redhat from effectively killing CentOS anymore. I still don’t want to build anything new on an distro that have still to prove they can maintain the project for two or three release.
  - CaliforniaKarl 5y ago
    The Scientific Linux team decided to not make a Scientific Linux 8, and instead switch over to CentOS 8[0]. Note this was announced prior to the announcement about CentOS 8 going away. CERN et al are still deciding what to do[1]. [0]: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX-ANNOUNCE;11d6001.1904 https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX... [1]: https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy https://linux.web.cern.ch/#update-on-centos-linux-strategy

Tsiklon 5y ago

Congratulations to the Rocky Linux team. I hope this is a sign of things to come

Tepix 5y ago

In terms of speed it looks as if Oracle was the first to get 8.4 of their RHEL clone out of the door, Alma Linux came second and RockyLinux is still at 8.3 I'm optimistic that they will get faster!

GNOMES 5y ago

I understand the desire to stick with the 10yrs of updates model, but it seems outdated with how fast things evolve. I am still waiting for Redhat to bring some details on how Stream will work long term. We need to know what packages will be unstable. People seem to be held up that Redhat releases will be taken from Stream, making it a "beta" of things to come instead of a free RH. I personally see this no different than Fedora > CentOS release cycle. I welcome newer features hitting our enterprise boxes sooner than later. I have read that it's also not a true rolling release, and instead will have minor stop gap channel releases along the way. Unless there is another big shake up like init vs systemD, it will be excellent to have an enterprise grade rolling release option for long lived (non-cattle) servers. Updating our fleet from 5 to 6, 6 to 7 was painful... Currently moved most of my Dev servers to Stream, and I am excluding a few packages from rolling with DNF-Automatic. Will this stay supported?

dralley 5y ago
CentOS Stream is rolling between minor releases, not between major releases. So e.g. a CentOS Stream 8 system won't roll over to CentOS Stream 9. I do believe they're working on making major version upgrades easier, but they would still not be automatic. None of the packages should be "unstable" barring any major bugs, (or maybe proprietary kernel modules that expect a very specific kernel version).
cpach 5y ago
IMHO: For those who want more frequent upgrades, then I would say a container-based solution is a good fit. Then the container don’t need to care if the underlying host has very old packages.

xaduha 5y ago

ISOs are a bare minimum of course, but what about official container images? Personally I'd like to see how it works with existing package repos that are out there. EDIT: tried unofficial image and it seems you can use stuff from mirror.centos.org if you mimic Centos by modifying /etc/dnf/vars/contentdir and /etc/dnf/vars/cloudsigdist. Use --nogpgcheck if necessary.

rockii2 5y ago

This was released back at the end of April. https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-8-3-rc1-release/ https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-8-3-rc1-release/

germ 5y ago

Good to see this project moving along, and if the team is monitoring this, give Brian a smack from me :P

INTPenis 5y ago

I'm responsible for fairly critical infrastructure and I've been putting all my bets on RHEL/CentOS these last 7 years. So my plan is to just sit back and watch how all this develops until 2023. Use RHEL when possible, Fedora or CentOS 7. Worst case maybe CentOS Stream. But there is no rush. Just sit back and let time decide which of these new contenders looks the best after 2 years.

stinkytaco 5y ago
Is RHEL compatibility a must? At this point it feels like the only community solution that has a long term track record is Debian.
- indigodaddy 5y ago
  There is a whole smorgasbord of entrenched application servers/software that are targeted mainly at the RHEL ecosystem. These would have a very difficult time transitioning to non-RHEL.
- protomyth 5y ago
  I have government contractors specify versions of Red Hat and they will not support other distributions. Of course, these vendors also specify versions of Windows Server that Microsoft recommends you no longer run.
- INTPenis 5y ago
  Yes, as others have pointed out already. Partly you have enterprise software from big vendors like Dell or Alcatel that is packaged for RHEL. You have hardware vendors like Dell and HPE who only offer support for supported OS. And yes I know CentOS is not a supported OS but its binary compatibility with RHEL meant you always had the option of migrating it to RHEL and get support. Also I have government clients who require SLA with support contracts on the systems. In those cases, given the arguments above, including years of experience, RHEL has more weight than Canonical or Suse. And besides all that, I'm actually a SElinux fanboy. I've had a lot of upgrade issues on Debian in the past and some clients even require certain yum features like history and rollback for patching. That said, I tend to use whatever is the right tool. I tend to look at how a service is designed to decide which distro to use. Of course I prefer homogenous environments but for example I'd rather put a stable CentOS as a webfront/TLS terminator and a bleeding edge Fedora as an application server for things like Node or Python. So in the future I would not rule out using Debian Stable as web front instead.

jb1991 5y ago

let’s hope the release isn’t rocky

forvelin 5y ago

We jumped off the CentOS boat after their statement and switched to OpenSuSe, no regrets so far, smooth sailing.

throwawaaarrgh 5y ago

If I was starting "another CentOS" I would ensure that companies above a certain amount of revenue had to pay (either in licensing fees or in engineer time). Non-corporate and FOSS uses should remain free. The reason I suggest this is differences in user engagement. It's hard to get community support for projects that are business-focused. A project that is very general-purpose can get quite a few volunteers or donations. But if businesses are the primary users, the project often gets little to no support from those businesses, and very infrequently any contributed code or support. Getting my own company to donate to an OSS project that they heavily depend on is like pulling teeth. Which is ridiculous, because without that project they'd be paying a lot more for proprietary software!

throwslkjlkja 5y ago
I mean that kind of defeats the point of the effort and FOSS in general. If you need to pay you just buy RedHat. CentOS reached ubiquity by being free. Many large corporations already have competent system admins managing large installations/clusters that RedHat offered nothing worth purchasing over CentOS. Another approach to support is probably better rather than becoming RedHat 0.1
- throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
  I used to support a corporate CentOS fork for years. I think I built something like 10,000 custom packages over several releases. If I found a bug and wanted to submit a code fix, I couldn't just submit it, because corporate wouldn't allow us to "release intellectual property". If I wanted to donate money I had to do it from my own wallet, because the company wouldn't approve the expense. But if our only legal option (given our size) was to pay one flat fee for infinite installs, or one flat fee per N nodes or something, the company would have approved that, because we needed to use something RHEL-like. If it's totally free, the company won't help at all. I think a few large companies could probably provide most of the funding necessary for the project, and still be ridiculously cheaper than RHEL. I'd only do this for business-focused projects, because of the tendency for those "users" not to contribute anything back. FOSS only thrives when people contribute. Otherwise you're a one-man software welfare program.

djhaskin987 5y ago

Frankly, since my company is pushing hard for a move away from the data center, we're really not talking about moving from CentOS 7 to e.g. Rocky any more anyway; we're talking about moving from CentOS 7 to Amazon Linux 2.