14 ms·

Rocky Linux 9.0

233 points by TangerineDream 4y ago

rob_c 4y ago
2 weeks ago https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-9-now-available/ https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-9-now-available/ Use a proper distro
jjice 4y ago
Hadn't heard about Rocky Linux since the initial announcement, but this is really great to see. 10 year LTS is pretty great, especially coming from Amazon Linux where you're lucky for three years...
chomp 4y ago
I'm super excited about this because it's being done in tandem with the release of Peridot, Rocky's internal tooling to build and maintain distro forks. https://github.com/rocky-linux/peridot https://github.com/rocky-linux/peridot
- freedomben 4y ago
  Oh neat, thank you I didn't realize they had released that. That's really a great value for the community! It increases my opinion of Rocky
gravitate 4y ago
Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?
- rnd0 4y ago
  I think the target audience is people who want RHEL but don't want to pay for it -same as almalinux?
- NoahKAndrews 4y ago
  This is an equivalent to CentOS, now that there won't be any more CentOS major releases besides CentOS Stream.
  - carlwgeorge 4y ago
    CentOS Stream still has major releases. It's not actually a rolling release.
- bubblethink 4y ago
  It's a downstream rebuild of RHEL 9. The release notes page tragically fails to mentions that. Chalk that up to failures of trademark law.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  10 years of support for $0. If you need to set up a box and forget that it exists (unless hardware breaks), this is what you use.
- _micheee 4y ago
  In case you don't intend distrohopping you use this for being "an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®." So its actually for people trying to replace CentOS which RedHat decided to drop :)
- ranger207 4y ago
  It's a server distro (unlike Mint) in the Red Hat family (unlike Ubuntu). As a server-oriented distribution it has options for installing with a bare minimum of packages, including no GUI, and typically has longer support cycles. As a Red Hat derivative, it generally features more recent versions of core Linux userland things like systemd, since Red Hat employs a lot of the developers of those features. In comparison to Ubuntu it also has far less snap packages, which some people like because snaps have various problems in their current implementation. The target audience is people who used to use Centos, before Red Hat ended Centos 8 years early and moved it to a rolling release schedule. Its primary competitors in the server-focused Red Hat derivatives are Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which is paid; Centos Stream, which is rolling release; or Alma Linux, which is, currently, basically the same distro due to how recent the Centos debacle was, but could diverge in the future.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  It's off-brand RHEL. There's some server software that isn't compatible with any other distro. So if you wanted to run it, you either had to pay for a RHEL license, or run it on CentOS, which was the original official off-brand version of RHEL. Then CentOS was killed by IBM/RedHat and reborn as the beta distro for the next RHEL release. Rocky Linux and Alma Linux were created to fill this niche. For example, you can run your production server on RHEL, but run your test and dev machines on Rocky while being reasonably sure that there won't be any compatibility issues.
  - carlwgeorge 4y ago
    If you pay for RHEL in production, you can get free RHEL for test/dev/etc via the "developer subscription for teams" program.
- cturner 4y ago
  Driver compatibility with redhat. Niche hardware like stack bypass network cards, packet capture cards, fpga cards will tend to have drivers issued for redhat, but not always for anything else. By using rocky/alma, you improve your odds to dodge hassle adapting the driver packs to other linux distros. Net booting. Distros vary in how awkward it is to get stripped setups set up for net booting. My experience is that the redhat world distros are easier for this than the debian world.
  - sliken 4y ago
    I've setup 100s of PXE boot servers, including CentOS, Rocky, and Ubuntu over the last 10 years or so. I've not noticed any difference between RHEL derived and Debian derived. On the redhat side they are called kickstart files, and on the debian side pre-seed. Both are a bit wonky and hard to debug before you have a full boot, but both seem to work fine.
bravetraveler 4y ago
Is anyone aware of a decent reference comparing say Alma and Rocky? I imagine the 'product' is essentially the same, but policies or procedures may differ - and these can be significant! It's what draws me to the Fedora project so much. Asking as someone who wasn't really that bothered by CentOS Stream. I've seen it as basically rolling point releases, which wouldn't be a problem for me personally
- freedomben 4y ago
  Disclaimer: Former Red Hat employee My info might be slightly outdated cause last I looked into it was a few months ago, but I would guess it's not terribly different. Yes both are essentially the same product. Main differences from user perspective are reliability of package servers and speed of updates, plus community experience if you get involved there (friendly tip: I suggest you stay the hell away from the cess pool that is Reddit. That whole site probably needs to die in a fire) *Alma Linux:* - Works closer with upstream (actually sends patches and participates with dev on CentOS) - Backed by a for-profit company (which I consider a good thing for longevity and reliability, but of course there's a risk of profit and community incentives misalignment) - Fastest on updates when upstream releases - Friendly and appreciative (generally speaking) toward Red Hat (without which none of their business would be possible) *Rocky Linux* - "Community" owned, but backed by some corporate money - Very volunteer-run. Have some paid employees working on but many volunteers - Hostile (and sometimes hateful) toward Red Hat I mostly use CentOS Stream though and that has been rock solid. I use Alma on my router and on a prod database server that will be nearly impossible to rebuild that I migrated to Alma from Cent, but CentOS feels better to me now than it did before changing to Stream.
  - rubyist5eva 4y ago
    What are you going to do when support for CentOS Stream 8 ends in 2024? Alma Linux 8 is supported until 2029 at least - for me it's a no brainer to use Alma for something like a database server.
    - dralley 4y ago
jmclnx 4y ago
congrads on 9.0!
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases
- bubblethink 4y ago
  They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    It's been close to 1.5 years. I've been using both since the beginning and can see pretty well how quickly both systems pick up updates. But let's just look at release delays (in days since the official RHEL is shipped): ver Alm Rocky 8.4 8 34 8.5 3 6 8.6 2 6 9.0 9 58 Not seeing any patterns here? One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole process streamlined and automated. The other started by loud release announcements, creating Slack groups and marketing materials, only then going for solving the technical stuff. I think I've made my choice pretty much right then and there. Seeing how Rocky guys behaved towards the community (like their refusal to go to a popular Linux podcast unless the host was willing to forego any comparisons with other Linux distributions), and these release delays proved that.
    - stonogo 4y ago
      It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority of the past couple years Valley-washing their Russian origins. A while back I watched their CEO beg their executive team to cut ties with Russian media sites. Rockey had a community governance model first, they had a distro-dedicated SecureBoot solution first (Alma 'borrowed' CloudLinux's), and so forth. If your metric is 'get package releases to my AWS fleet first' then Alma is winning. For all the rest of the provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is the winner. It's all a matter of priorities.
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?
- freedomben 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.
  - arsome 4y ago
    The commercial support being offered is from 3rd parties, not from Rocky Linux itself.
    - carlwgeorge 4y ago
      There are only two, and one of them is owned by the same person that owns Rocky.
    - freedomben 4y ago
      Yes, this is a good point to make explicitly, thank you. The support is from 3rd parties. Those 3rd parties are probably kicking some funding back, but I don't think Rocky is doing anything unethical by offering their rebuild or by accepting that money. I think overall Rocky is a net positive for the world and for Red Hat.
  - tjader 4y ago
    Is it more unethical than any other entity selling consulting for CentOS and Red Hat support?
orev 4y ago
I wish both Rocky and Alma well, as having multiple projects active keeps everyone on their toes. Glad to see this release from Rocky!
dang 4y ago
Related: Rocky Linux 8.4 GA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579297 - June 2021 (24 comments) Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568087 - June 2021 (64 comments) Rocky Linux releases its first release candidate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 - May 2021 (116 comments) Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445725 - Dec 2020 (533 comments) Rocky Linux: Community enterprise OS compatible with RHEL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358739 - Dec 2020 (16 comments) Original CentOS founder intends to create new fork of RHEL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25354811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25354811 - Dec 2020 (8 comments)
fariszr 4y ago
If only RHEL based distorts supported in place upgrades. Its one of the reasons why I stick to Debian. As for OpenSuse, official support from things like Docker is pretty rare.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I find it interesting that there's a need for Rocky to exist at all. IBM basically killed Centos, which was the unofficial Red Hat release that came into existence when Red Hat stopped providing free versions of Red Hat which Red Hat then grand fathered in as a thing they actively supported. That whole process was just weird. I did not encounter a single project that actually used Red Hat after that happened: world + dog used Centos at the time. That seemed like a horrible process to put up artificial hurdles for people to transition to Red Hat. Killing Centos and then having Rocky and Alm emerge immediately after makes this even less likely. As a business strategy this just seems pretty misguided. These days, I don't deal with the whole red hat ecosystem at all (why would I?). Software ships in docker form these days and I'll typically either deploy it on whatever my cloud provider uses without really messing with that directly or setting up a simple Ubuntu server with Docker using things like Ansible. My daily driver is a Manjaro laptop currently. I like it because I get current versions of everything I need as opposed to old stuff like Gnome 40. Do people actually put Rocky on workstations? My impression is that that whole ecosystem is more about servers and that Fedora is the preferred thing for people in that ecosystem on desktops.
- tokamak 4y ago
  RedHat benefit is support. You can sue them if something goes wrong ;) Good engineering is using on local what is used on servers. RHEL definitely is about servers foremost. There are many industries where RHEL is a must. Amazon Linux is derivative of RHEL. Good point about containers.
  - chasil 4y ago
    I'm not sure if Suse Liberty Linux ISOs are fully available yet, but that is yet another clone offering support. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ Oracle Linux 9 also dropped a week ago, and their support is available if increasingly expensive. The problem with both of these is app support certifications. Microsoft SQL Server (for example) is solely supported on RHEL, although it's obvious that they build on CentOS.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
mekster 4y ago
So, how many of you jumped ship emotionally from CentOS when it was just fine if you think about it?
silisili 4y ago
Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion random services running at any time because it's a dev machine, and... nothing really ever breaks. I get kernel vulnerability patches in a couple days, vs waiting weeks for some hacked together 2.6.8294 backport. Even if that weren't the case, between snapshotting filesystems and containerized everything, it just feels like such cautious, controlled OS software is a thing of the past. As always, happy to be told I'm incorrect and/or hear use cases.
- xfer 4y ago
  The target audience is the machines that host your vms, these need to have a stable environment for a long time(of course patched for security when needed).
- iasay 4y ago
  About 18 years ago I wrote an internal intranet application for someone in PHP (yuck). This runs one of their core business processes. Every 3 years we do a review of the system, replace the hardware and update the software. This is exactly where CentOS variants sit for me. The last two upgrade cycles, the computer has not been down at all in the interim. It has literally been up for 3 years. The only changes have been to support later versions of Postgres and PHP and to move the backups to S3 rather than tape. Why not the cloud? The company is in a rural location with a shitty internet connection and 50 users. When initially provisioned there was no internet connection at all! There’s a lot of stuff which is in the territory of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and that’s where these distributions sit. That may cover industrial, office, line of business apps, temporarily connected or fully offline systems. Or just stuff you don’t want to piss around with. Also never underestimate the power of having stuff you don’t have to touch or even go near. When was the last time you got paid monthly to do something once every three years?
  - 4y ago
pt_PT_guy 4y ago
I've been happy with Oracle Linux for free at home usage. With a well-established, stable, consistent timed releases. Is there any reason why should I switch to Rocky (or Alma?)

2 weeks ago https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-9-now-available/ https://almalinux.org/blog/almalinux-9-now-available/ Use a proper distro

jjice 4y ago

Hadn't heard about Rocky Linux since the initial announcement, but this is really great to see. 10 year LTS is pretty great, especially coming from Amazon Linux where you're lucky for three years...

chomp 4y ago

I'm super excited about this because it's being done in tandem with the release of Peridot, Rocky's internal tooling to build and maintain distro forks. https://github.com/rocky-linux/peridot https://github.com/rocky-linux/peridot

freedomben 4y ago
Oh neat, thank you I didn't realize they had released that. That's really a great value for the community! It increases my opinion of Rocky

gravitate 4y ago

Why should I use this over, say, Ubuntu or Linux Mint? What’s the unique selling point? And what’s the target audience besides Linux enthusiasts who still distrohop?

rnd0 4y ago
I think the target audience is people who want RHEL but don't want to pay for it -same as almalinux?
NoahKAndrews 4y ago
This is an equivalent to CentOS, now that there won't be any more CentOS major releases besides CentOS Stream.
- carlwgeorge 4y ago
  CentOS Stream still has major releases. It's not actually a rolling release.
bubblethink 4y ago
It's a downstream rebuild of RHEL 9. The release notes page tragically fails to mentions that. Chalk that up to failures of trademark law.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
10 years of support for $0. If you need to set up a box and forget that it exists (unless hardware breaks), this is what you use.
_micheee 4y ago
In case you don't intend distrohopping you use this for being "an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®." So its actually for people trying to replace CentOS which RedHat decided to drop :)
ranger207 4y ago
It's a server distro (unlike Mint) in the Red Hat family (unlike Ubuntu). As a server-oriented distribution it has options for installing with a bare minimum of packages, including no GUI, and typically has longer support cycles. As a Red Hat derivative, it generally features more recent versions of core Linux userland things like systemd, since Red Hat employs a lot of the developers of those features. In comparison to Ubuntu it also has far less snap packages, which some people like because snaps have various problems in their current implementation. The target audience is people who used to use Centos, before Red Hat ended Centos 8 years early and moved it to a rolling release schedule. Its primary competitors in the server-focused Red Hat derivatives are Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, which is paid; Centos Stream, which is rolling release; or Alma Linux, which is, currently, basically the same distro due to how recent the Centos debacle was, but could diverge in the future.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
orthoxerox 4y ago
It's off-brand RHEL. There's some server software that isn't compatible with any other distro. So if you wanted to run it, you either had to pay for a RHEL license, or run it on CentOS, which was the original official off-brand version of RHEL. Then CentOS was killed by IBM/RedHat and reborn as the beta distro for the next RHEL release. Rocky Linux and Alma Linux were created to fill this niche. For example, you can run your production server on RHEL, but run your test and dev machines on Rocky while being reasonably sure that there won't be any compatibility issues.
- carlwgeorge 4y ago
  If you pay for RHEL in production, you can get free RHEL for test/dev/etc via the "developer subscription for teams" program.
cturner 4y ago
Driver compatibility with redhat. Niche hardware like stack bypass network cards, packet capture cards, fpga cards will tend to have drivers issued for redhat, but not always for anything else. By using rocky/alma, you improve your odds to dodge hassle adapting the driver packs to other linux distros. Net booting. Distros vary in how awkward it is to get stripped setups set up for net booting. My experience is that the redhat world distros are easier for this than the debian world.
- sliken 4y ago
  I've setup 100s of PXE boot servers, including CentOS, Rocky, and Ubuntu over the last 10 years or so. I've not noticed any difference between RHEL derived and Debian derived. On the redhat side they are called kickstart files, and on the debian side pre-seed. Both are a bit wonky and hard to debug before you have a full boot, but both seem to work fine.

bravetraveler 4y ago

Is anyone aware of a decent reference comparing say Alma and Rocky? I imagine the 'product' is essentially the same, but policies or procedures may differ - and these can be significant! It's what draws me to the Fedora project so much. Asking as someone who wasn't really that bothered by CentOS Stream. I've seen it as basically rolling point releases, which wouldn't be a problem for me personally

freedomben 4y ago
Disclaimer: Former Red Hat employee My info might be slightly outdated cause last I looked into it was a few months ago, but I would guess it's not terribly different. Yes both are essentially the same product. Main differences from user perspective are reliability of package servers and speed of updates, plus community experience if you get involved there (friendly tip: I suggest you stay the hell away from the cess pool that is Reddit. That whole site probably needs to die in a fire) *Alma Linux:* - Works closer with upstream (actually sends patches and participates with dev on CentOS) - Backed by a for-profit company (which I consider a good thing for longevity and reliability, but of course there's a risk of profit and community incentives misalignment) - Fastest on updates when upstream releases - Friendly and appreciative (generally speaking) toward Red Hat (without which none of their business would be possible) *Rocky Linux* - "Community" owned, but backed by some corporate money - Very volunteer-run. Have some paid employees working on but many volunteers - Hostile (and sometimes hateful) toward Red Hat I mostly use CentOS Stream though and that has been rock solid. I use Alma on my router and on a prod database server that will be nearly impossible to rebuild that I migrated to Alma from Cent, but CentOS feels better to me now than it did before changing to Stream.
- rubyist5eva 4y ago
  What are you going to do when support for CentOS Stream 8 ends in 2024? Alma Linux 8 is supported until 2029 at least - for me it's a no brainer to use Alma for something like a database server.
  - dralley 4y ago

jmclnx 4y ago

congrads on 9.0!

5e92cb50239222b 4y ago

Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases

bubblethink 4y ago
They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
  It's been close to 1.5 years. I've been using both since the beginning and can see pretty well how quickly both systems pick up updates. But let's just look at release delays (in days since the official RHEL is shipped): ver Alm Rocky 8.4 8 34 8.5 3 6 8.6 2 6 9.0 9 58 Not seeing any patterns here? One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole process streamlined and automated. The other started by loud release announcements, creating Slack groups and marketing materials, only then going for solving the technical stuff. I think I've made my choice pretty much right then and there. Seeing how Rocky guys behaved towards the community (like their refusal to go to a popular Linux podcast unless the host was willing to forego any comparisons with other Linux distributions), and these release delays proved that.
  - stonogo 4y ago
    It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority of the past couple years Valley-washing their Russian origins. A while back I watched their CEO beg their executive team to cut ties with Russian media sites. Rockey had a community governance model first, they had a distro-dedicated SecureBoot solution first (Alma 'borrowed' CloudLinux's), and so forth. If your metric is 'get package releases to my AWS fleet first' then Alma is winning. For all the rest of the provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is the winner. It's all a matter of priorities.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

freedomben 4y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.
- arsome 4y ago
  The commercial support being offered is from 3rd parties, not from Rocky Linux itself.
  - carlwgeorge 4y ago
    There are only two, and one of them is owned by the same person that owns Rocky.
  - freedomben 4y ago
    Yes, this is a good point to make explicitly, thank you. The support is from 3rd parties. Those 3rd parties are probably kicking some funding back, but I don't think Rocky is doing anything unethical by offering their rebuild or by accepting that money. I think overall Rocky is a net positive for the world and for Red Hat.
- tjader 4y ago
  Is it more unethical than any other entity selling consulting for CentOS and Red Hat support?

orev 4y ago

I wish both Rocky and Alma well, as having multiple projects active keeps everyone on their toes. Glad to see this release from Rocky!

dang 4y ago

Related: Rocky Linux 8.4 GA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579297 - June 2021 (24 comments) Rocky Linux 8.4 RC1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27568087 - June 2021 (64 comments) Rocky Linux releases its first release candidate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27304012 - May 2021 (116 comments) Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445725 - Dec 2020 (533 comments) Rocky Linux: Community enterprise OS compatible with RHEL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25358739 - Dec 2020 (16 comments) Original CentOS founder intends to create new fork of RHEL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25354811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25354811 - Dec 2020 (8 comments)

fariszr 4y ago

If only RHEL based distorts supported in place upgrades. Its one of the reasons why I stick to Debian. As for OpenSuse, official support from things like Docker is pretty rare.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I find it interesting that there's a need for Rocky to exist at all. IBM basically killed Centos, which was the unofficial Red Hat release that came into existence when Red Hat stopped providing free versions of Red Hat which Red Hat then grand fathered in as a thing they actively supported. That whole process was just weird. I did not encounter a single project that actually used Red Hat after that happened: world + dog used Centos at the time. That seemed like a horrible process to put up artificial hurdles for people to transition to Red Hat. Killing Centos and then having Rocky and Alm emerge immediately after makes this even less likely. As a business strategy this just seems pretty misguided. These days, I don't deal with the whole red hat ecosystem at all (why would I?). Software ships in docker form these days and I'll typically either deploy it on whatever my cloud provider uses without really messing with that directly or setting up a simple Ubuntu server with Docker using things like Ansible. My daily driver is a Manjaro laptop currently. I like it because I get current versions of everything I need as opposed to old stuff like Gnome 40. Do people actually put Rocky on workstations? My impression is that that whole ecosystem is more about servers and that Fedora is the preferred thing for people in that ecosystem on desktops.

tokamak 4y ago
RedHat benefit is support. You can sue them if something goes wrong ;) Good engineering is using on local what is used on servers. RHEL definitely is about servers foremost. There are many industries where RHEL is a must. Amazon Linux is derivative of RHEL. Good point about containers.
- chasil 4y ago
  I'm not sure if Suse Liberty Linux ISOs are fully available yet, but that is yet another clone offering support. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ Oracle Linux 9 also dropped a week ago, and their support is available if increasingly expensive. The problem with both of these is app support certifications. Microsoft SQL Server (for example) is solely supported on RHEL, although it's obvious that they build on CentOS.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago

mekster 4y ago

So, how many of you jumped ship emotionally from CentOS when it was just fine if you think about it?

silisili 4y ago

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion random services running at any time because it's a dev machine, and... nothing really ever breaks. I get kernel vulnerability patches in a couple days, vs waiting weeks for some hacked together 2.6.8294 backport. Even if that weren't the case, between snapshotting filesystems and containerized everything, it just feels like such cautious, controlled OS software is a thing of the past. As always, happy to be told I'm incorrect and/or hear use cases.

xfer 4y ago
The target audience is the machines that host your vms, these need to have a stable environment for a long time(of course patched for security when needed).
iasay 4y ago
About 18 years ago I wrote an internal intranet application for someone in PHP (yuck). This runs one of their core business processes. Every 3 years we do a review of the system, replace the hardware and update the software. This is exactly where CentOS variants sit for me. The last two upgrade cycles, the computer has not been down at all in the interim. It has literally been up for 3 years. The only changes have been to support later versions of Postgres and PHP and to move the backups to S3 rather than tape. Why not the cloud? The company is in a rural location with a shitty internet connection and 50 users. When initially provisioned there was no internet connection at all! There’s a lot of stuff which is in the territory of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and that’s where these distributions sit. That may cover industrial, office, line of business apps, temporarily connected or fully offline systems. Or just stuff you don’t want to piss around with. Also never underestimate the power of having stuff you don’t have to touch or even go near. When was the last time you got paid monthly to do something once every three years?
- 4y ago

pt_PT_guy 4y ago

I've been happy with Oracle Linux for free at home usage. With a well-established, stable, consistent timed releases. Is there any reason why should I switch to Rocky (or Alma?)