9 ms·

Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1

140 points by mariuz 5y ago

patchtopic 5y ago
available for 2 weeks.. I installed it on a VM for a quick look and promising so far.
- cpach 5y ago
  Hopefully the GA release is available soon!
- bexsella 5y ago
  More than two weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012
  - tssva 5y ago
    Rocky Linux's first release candidate was for 8.3. According to the news section at the Rocky Linux site the RC1 for 8.4 was released on June 4th.
mfontani 5y ago
> Upgrading [...] from a release candidate to a stable release will not be supported Why does this distro make it hard for people to use it?
- post-factum 5y ago
  "…meaning it will not be tested nor documented." Likely, you'll still be able to do it.
  - chousuke 5y ago
    You will. Considering how easy it is to convert between distros with DNF (I've often wished APT had distro-sync) I'd be surprised if there were any real issues upgrading; it's most likely just left to the user's expertise to fix things should any issues arise.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      It's easy to convert between distros based on RH. The package manager is coincidental. You wouldn't have as smooth conversion between SL, Fedora, and Suse for example.
      - chousuke 5y ago
        I wouldn't say the package manager is entirely coincidental; distro-sync and transaction support makes it easier than it would be if you did the equivalent operation using APT. I'm pretty sure I could convert RHEL into Fedora and vice versa (probably not Suse though, it's too different), but I admit it's not going to be as easy as switching between EL distros.
    - tgmux 5y ago
      Exactly this. No reason to think it shouldn't work, but probably a better use of folks' time doing something else than trying to troubleshoot this very corner case.
- robert_foss 5y ago
  I'd say this is pretty fair considering that a fair amount of serious issues can be expected for the first ever release of a distro.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    But isn't this just Red Hat with the name changed?
    - cpach 5y ago
      Kinda sorta yeah. But I guess the Rocky project still needs to set up their own build servers, CI/CD, package repositories and that kinda stuff.
  - mekster 5y ago
    And yet, ironically people like it better than CentOS stream? People are making such a big fuss about CentOS getting slightly closer to Fedora.
    - fragbait65 5y ago
      That's not what this is about. The scientific community cannot run a distribution with "unneeded" updates to libraries. That goes for other organizations as well.
      - mekster 5y ago
        That's for those who can't pay for RHEL subscriptions and they have such critical experiments going on that getting updates earlier than RedHat screws them up? They can surely opt out of updating automatically and only apply updates after reading the changelogs.
        jabl 5y ago
        In many cases systems run out-of-tree drivers like Lustre, MOFED, NVIDIA etc. that tend to break due to kernel internal API changes. Yes, also for changes incorporated into minor RHEL releases like X.Y -> X.(Y+1), though not for kernel security updates within a minor X.Y release. At the same time they might need to keep up to date wrt security updates. So if CentOS stream implies that the kernel will randomly get an API-breaking update, with no security support for the previous version, that is not workable.
- maxnoe 5y ago
  Please cut them some slack for this. It is not like this is the rc for the next version of a long running distribution. It is the first ever release using a from scratch implemented build infrastructure.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    People have been treating Rocky as a done deal, a ready to go CentOS replacement for months. It will be very soon, hopefully, but the developers haven’t claimed to ready. Using Rocky Linux as a basis for a long term production system is still a few months or perhaps a year into the future, and people need to let the team get everything in place before complaing that they can’t seemlessly move from one free OS to another.
reniflex 5y ago
Linux is deprecated and no longer maintained. Please use FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
teruakohatu 5y ago
So are Red Hat source packages still available? What incentive does IBM have to make them available? The source code of the applications, sure. But why the source rpms? Why doesn't Amazon and friends just make a dist that is not tied to Red Hat?
- sofixa 5y ago
  > Why doesn't Amazon and friends just make a dist that is not tied to Red Hat? Because RHEL is a known distro many vendors test for and allow. Having compatibility with it is a huge boon for adoption, since you can just use lots of software. If you do a distro from scratch, you're on your own.
  - cpach 5y ago
    This. Amazon probably believes that doing their own distro would be both harder and more expensive.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- viraptor 5y ago
  Amazon is already releasing Amazon Linux AMIs which are similar to rhel, but you're not supposed to expect any compatibility. They're branching the behaviour off when needed.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    It's hard to know design about compatibility between Amazon Linux and RHEL. It seems that Amazon Linux no longer targets full RHEL/Fedora compatible, but it still support EPEL. Anyone know good documentation?
tambourine_man 5y ago
Some vendors that didn’t support Ubuntu now do after the CentOS disaster and I’m much happier now. But I feel for those that don’t want or can’t use Debian based distros.
- nix23 5y ago
  >But I feel for those that don’t want or can’t use Debian based distros. Why? CentOS was already a terrible choice, artificially slow release compared to RHEL, now you can choose from: -OracleLinux (pretty good..and no i don't like oracle itself...but the Wallpaper is extremely beautiful..UEK is cool too) -RHEL (free for up to 16 instances) -That new one with A -That Chinese one with the UNIX certification .....and so on
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It's healthy for everyone to have a competition. I want successful Debian even though I'm running CentOS these days. But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases - many users will list that as a benefit. Even more these days with containerised apps.
    - nix23 5y ago
      >It's healthy for everyone to have a competition Recompile src-files and exchange a branding is not really what i call "competition" >I want successful Debian Debian IS successful. >But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases That's not what is said nor meant, if for example RHEL 8.2 was released it took CentOS sometimes up to 6 month to release their 8.2 counterpart, in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1. But maybe your not in the market of having the latest patch for 3rd party software.
      - viraptor 5y ago
        > in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1. Is this a real scenario? Can you point to a product officially compatible with CentOS, with a patch released only for rhel 8.2 and ignoring CentOS 8.1?
spapas82 5y ago
Two questions pop into my mind: A. How easy will it be for the unlucky people that have installed Centos 8 to convert it to rocky Linux? B. Will rocky Linux fulfill its promises? I mean if I install rocky Linux 8.4 will I still have a supported OS at 2029?
- chousuke 5y ago
  You can convert between any RHEL-like distro by changing your repos, swapping/removing a few key packages (release, branding, subscription-manager certs if converting from RHEL) and then running distro-sync to make sure your other packages match your repositories. This can be done transactionally via the "shell" subcommand which allows you to run multiple commands in a single transaction. YUM/DNF can do the whole thing without much fuss.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > I mean if I install rocky Linux 8.4 will I still have a supported OS at 2029? I'm not sure that's a fair question to a new project. If you asked that recently about Windows 10, you'd have a different answer than today. But seriously, Rocky was started by the person doing CentOS before and unhappy with changes. They're at the very least not planning to go away.
  - derekp7 5y ago
    Also take a look at their principal sponsors list. It includes AWS and Google cloud. They would both have an invested interest in keeping a supported free RHEL clone around.
    - jaboutboul 5y ago
      AWS is also sponsoring AlmaLinux.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Forget Windows; CentOS 8 was supposed to live that long until RH changed their mind one day.
jaboutboul 5y ago
You should also look into AlmaLinux (https://almalinux.org https://almalinux.org) which released 8.4 Stable quite a while ago already. Super experienced team and they also established a true non-profit to avoid what happened to CentOS in the past.
- wishigotitfree 5y ago
  Seconding this. As someone who's depended on CentOS for years, I like how AlmaLinux has been set up so far. The fact that it's the CloudLinux people who made this is also a plus.
christophilus 5y ago
If you have no dependency on a specific distro, what distro would you choose for your servers? I’m leaning towards Debian at this point. On my laptop and desktop, I run Fedora and Arch, though, so keeping that consistent with my servers might be nice. For that reason, I’ve been thinking of kicking the tires on Debian testing / sid for the laptop.
- derekp7 5y ago
  Personally the reason I use a RHEL based distro on servers is due to third party tools that target RHEL, and also I am heavily invested in a personal knowledge base on the RHEL specifics such as how they implement SElinux, etc. Therefore I run Fedora on my personal workstations so that when a new release of RHEL comes out, I already know it. But now I'm seeing more items target Ubuntu first. For example a colleague at work wanted me to get an overview of Swift -- for the longest time I couldn't get it for RHEL or Fedora, but could for Ubuntu. And a number of tutorial articles assume using Debian or Ubuntu. My main issue with Debian based distros is the package manager doesn't track enough metadata about packages (a lot is stored in a sequential log file that can get purged/rotated out, but isn't in a package database, such as install date/history/rollback information). That, and packages on RHEL / Fedora tend to install without needing input (they have sane defaults that you customize after), they also don't auto-enable when installing (so you have more control), etc.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    > Swift -- for the longest time I couldn't get it for RHEL or Fedora, but could for Ubuntu Long before it became available on Ubuntu you could very easily run it on Arch. Same for many other applications. It's pretty sad that a bunch of pimply children managed to meme it into a thing that a civilized person shouldn't even mention these days, because the software availability situation is above everything else out there (thanks to AUR and incredibly simple package format — you can write a proper package in a few minutes).
    - brtln 5y ago
      Some people prefer stability over software availability. Arch leaves much to be desired given it's lack of tooling that's been available for years for other distributions. It's an hobbyist project all along.
infinet 5y ago
I wonder what CERN going to do next. Which distro will they choose after CentOS 7? Rocky linux, Ubuntu, or go back to Scientific Linux. Lots of HEP softwares have pre-compiled packages for CentOS and Ubuntu. CERN has been pretty quiet in past several months.

Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1

140 points by mariuz 5y ago

patchtopic 5y ago

available for 2 weeks.. I installed it on a VM for a quick look and promising so far.

cpach 5y ago
Hopefully the GA release is available soon!
bexsella 5y ago
More than two weeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012
- tssva 5y ago
  Rocky Linux's first release candidate was for 8.3. According to the news section at the Rocky Linux site the RC1 for 8.4 was released on June 4th.

mfontani 5y ago

> Upgrading [...] from a release candidate to a stable release will not be supported Why does this distro make it hard for people to use it?

post-factum 5y ago
"…meaning it will not be tested nor documented." Likely, you'll still be able to do it.
- chousuke 5y ago
  You will. Considering how easy it is to convert between distros with DNF (I've often wished APT had distro-sync) I'd be surprised if there were any real issues upgrading; it's most likely just left to the user's expertise to fix things should any issues arise.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    It's easy to convert between distros based on RH. The package manager is coincidental. You wouldn't have as smooth conversion between SL, Fedora, and Suse for example.
    - chousuke 5y ago
      I wouldn't say the package manager is entirely coincidental; distro-sync and transaction support makes it easier than it would be if you did the equivalent operation using APT. I'm pretty sure I could convert RHEL into Fedora and vice versa (probably not Suse though, it's too different), but I admit it's not going to be as easy as switching between EL distros.
  - tgmux 5y ago
    Exactly this. No reason to think it shouldn't work, but probably a better use of folks' time doing something else than trying to troubleshoot this very corner case.
robert_foss 5y ago
I'd say this is pretty fair considering that a fair amount of serious issues can be expected for the first ever release of a distro.
- pantalaimon 5y ago
  But isn't this just Red Hat with the name changed?
  - cpach 5y ago
    Kinda sorta yeah. But I guess the Rocky project still needs to set up their own build servers, CI/CD, package repositories and that kinda stuff.
- mekster 5y ago
  And yet, ironically people like it better than CentOS stream? People are making such a big fuss about CentOS getting slightly closer to Fedora.
  - fragbait65 5y ago
    That's not what this is about. The scientific community cannot run a distribution with "unneeded" updates to libraries. That goes for other organizations as well.
    - mekster 5y ago
      That's for those who can't pay for RHEL subscriptions and they have such critical experiments going on that getting updates earlier than RedHat screws them up? They can surely opt out of updating automatically and only apply updates after reading the changelogs.
      - jabl 5y ago
        In many cases systems run out-of-tree drivers like Lustre, MOFED, NVIDIA etc. that tend to break due to kernel internal API changes. Yes, also for changes incorporated into minor RHEL releases like X.Y -> X.(Y+1), though not for kernel security updates within a minor X.Y release. At the same time they might need to keep up to date wrt security updates. So if CentOS stream implies that the kernel will randomly get an API-breaking update, with no security support for the previous version, that is not workable.
maxnoe 5y ago
Please cut them some slack for this. It is not like this is the rc for the next version of a long running distribution. It is the first ever release using a from scratch implemented build infrastructure.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  People have been treating Rocky as a done deal, a ready to go CentOS replacement for months. It will be very soon, hopefully, but the developers haven’t claimed to ready. Using Rocky Linux as a basis for a long term production system is still a few months or perhaps a year into the future, and people need to let the team get everything in place before complaing that they can’t seemlessly move from one free OS to another.

reniflex 5y ago

Linux is deprecated and no longer maintained. Please use FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

teruakohatu 5y ago

So are Red Hat source packages still available? What incentive does IBM have to make them available? The source code of the applications, sure. But why the source rpms? Why doesn't Amazon and friends just make a dist that is not tied to Red Hat?

sofixa 5y ago
> Why doesn't Amazon and friends just make a dist that is not tied to Red Hat? Because RHEL is a known distro many vendors test for and allow. Having compatibility with it is a huge boon for adoption, since you can just use lots of software. If you do a distro from scratch, you're on your own.
- cpach 5y ago
  This. Amazon probably believes that doing their own distro would be both harder and more expensive.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
viraptor 5y ago
Amazon is already releasing Amazon Linux AMIs which are similar to rhel, but you're not supposed to expect any compatibility. They're branching the behaviour off when needed.
- fomine3 5y ago
  It's hard to know design about compatibility between Amazon Linux and RHEL. It seems that Amazon Linux no longer targets full RHEL/Fedora compatible, but it still support EPEL. Anyone know good documentation?

tambourine_man 5y ago

Some vendors that didn’t support Ubuntu now do after the CentOS disaster and I’m much happier now. But I feel for those that don’t want or can’t use Debian based distros.

nix23 5y ago
>But I feel for those that don’t want or can’t use Debian based distros. Why? CentOS was already a terrible choice, artificially slow release compared to RHEL, now you can choose from: -OracleLinux (pretty good..and no i don't like oracle itself...but the Wallpaper is extremely beautiful..UEK is cool too) -RHEL (free for up to 16 instances) -That new one with A -That Chinese one with the UNIX certification .....and so on
- viraptor 5y ago
  It's healthy for everyone to have a competition. I want successful Debian even though I'm running CentOS these days. But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases - many users will list that as a benefit. Even more these days with containerised apps.
  - nix23 5y ago
    >It's healthy for everyone to have a competition Recompile src-files and exchange a branding is not really what i call "competition" >I want successful Debian Debian IS successful. >But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases That's not what is said nor meant, if for example RHEL 8.2 was released it took CentOS sometimes up to 6 month to release their 8.2 counterpart, in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1. But maybe your not in the market of having the latest patch for 3rd party software.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      > in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1. Is this a real scenario? Can you point to a product officially compatible with CentOS, with a patch released only for rhel 8.2 and ignoring CentOS 8.1?

spapas82 5y ago

Two questions pop into my mind: A. How easy will it be for the unlucky people that have installed Centos 8 to convert it to rocky Linux? B. Will rocky Linux fulfill its promises? I mean if I install rocky Linux 8.4 will I still have a supported OS at 2029?

chousuke 5y ago
You can convert between any RHEL-like distro by changing your repos, swapping/removing a few key packages (release, branding, subscription-manager certs if converting from RHEL) and then running distro-sync to make sure your other packages match your repositories. This can be done transactionally via the "shell" subcommand which allows you to run multiple commands in a single transaction. YUM/DNF can do the whole thing without much fuss.
viraptor 5y ago
> I mean if I install rocky Linux 8.4 will I still have a supported OS at 2029? I'm not sure that's a fair question to a new project. If you asked that recently about Windows 10, you'd have a different answer than today. But seriously, Rocky was started by the person doing CentOS before and unhappy with changes. They're at the very least not planning to go away.
- derekp7 5y ago
  Also take a look at their principal sponsors list. It includes AWS and Google cloud. They would both have an invested interest in keeping a supported free RHEL clone around.
  - jaboutboul 5y ago
    AWS is also sponsoring AlmaLinux.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Forget Windows; CentOS 8 was supposed to live that long until RH changed their mind one day.

jaboutboul 5y ago

You should also look into AlmaLinux (https://almalinux.org https://almalinux.org) which released 8.4 Stable quite a while ago already. Super experienced team and they also established a true non-profit to avoid what happened to CentOS in the past.

wishigotitfree 5y ago
Seconding this. As someone who's depended on CentOS for years, I like how AlmaLinux has been set up so far. The fact that it's the CloudLinux people who made this is also a plus.

christophilus 5y ago

If you have no dependency on a specific distro, what distro would you choose for your servers? I’m leaning towards Debian at this point. On my laptop and desktop, I run Fedora and Arch, though, so keeping that consistent with my servers might be nice. For that reason, I’ve been thinking of kicking the tires on Debian testing / sid for the laptop.

derekp7 5y ago
Personally the reason I use a RHEL based distro on servers is due to third party tools that target RHEL, and also I am heavily invested in a personal knowledge base on the RHEL specifics such as how they implement SElinux, etc. Therefore I run Fedora on my personal workstations so that when a new release of RHEL comes out, I already know it. But now I'm seeing more items target Ubuntu first. For example a colleague at work wanted me to get an overview of Swift -- for the longest time I couldn't get it for RHEL or Fedora, but could for Ubuntu. And a number of tutorial articles assume using Debian or Ubuntu. My main issue with Debian based distros is the package manager doesn't track enough metadata about packages (a lot is stored in a sequential log file that can get purged/rotated out, but isn't in a package database, such as install date/history/rollback information). That, and packages on RHEL / Fedora tend to install without needing input (they have sane defaults that you customize after), they also don't auto-enable when installing (so you have more control), etc.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  > Swift -- for the longest time I couldn't get it for RHEL or Fedora, but could for Ubuntu Long before it became available on Ubuntu you could very easily run it on Arch. Same for many other applications. It's pretty sad that a bunch of pimply children managed to meme it into a thing that a civilized person shouldn't even mention these days, because the software availability situation is above everything else out there (thanks to AUR and incredibly simple package format — you can write a proper package in a few minutes).
  - brtln 5y ago
    Some people prefer stability over software availability. Arch leaves much to be desired given it's lack of tooling that's been available for years for other distributions. It's an hobbyist project all along.

infinet 5y ago

I wonder what CERN going to do next. Which distro will they choose after CentOS 7? Rocky linux, Ubuntu, or go back to Scientific Linux. Lots of HEP softwares have pre-compiled packages for CentOS and Ubuntu. CERN has been pretty quiet in past several months.