Rocky Linux

[Frank Cox]

Some of you folks who use Linux may find this interesting.

For a fair number of years I've been using Centos for pretty much everything that I do. Centos is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it's a really stable no-surprises Linux. No latest and greatest shiny stuff but (hopefully) no huge explosions either.

Enterprise Linux. The clue is in the name.

As of a few years ago Red Hat owns Centos too and they have decided (effective December 31 2021) to make Centos into a test version for the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of a free clone of RHEL.

Nobody who uses Centos likes this idea much, of course, so the original Centos developers have returned and are now making Rocky Linux.

Earlier this year I seriously considered switching to Oracle Linux, which is another RHEL clone, but at the time I figured there was no rush to do anything so I could just sit back and see how things shook out over the course of the year. I even set up a laptop with Oracle to try it out. And there's still nothing exactly wrong with Oracle Linux as such except that it's such a black box as far as development is concerned; everything seems to be just a one way black hole in that regard.

Rocky, on the other hand, is now pretty much what Centos was and has been up to this point: a RHEL clone with a different name logo.

Since the EOL for Centos 8 is December 31 and since I seem to have a fair bit of extra free time these days *cough* the time has come to deal with this issue.

My main computer (this one) is running on Rocky right now and there's absolutely no difference between this and Centos other than the logo that it shows you when it's booting up.

Rocky has a nifty do-it-all migration script migrate2rocky.sh that really does do everything for you. Anyone with a Centos 8 installation can just run that script. It replaces everything Centos with everything Rocky and when it's done you reboot and have exactly what you had before, except now it's a Rocky Linux installation. Literally, that's all it takes to switch from Centos. Download the migration script, run it, come back in an hour or so and reboot when it's done.

Now my computers will be running Rocky and I'll be using that for all future projects instead of Centos.

[Randy Stankey]

Wasn’t Fedora supposed to be Red Hat’s public beta?

Okay, I admit that responsibilities of life have prevented me from geeking out on computers the way I like but I didn’t think that I was THAT far behind the ball.

What did they do? Merge Fedora and Centos? Did they, somehow, branch Fedora or did they just kill it?

[Frank Cox]

The idea as I understand it is that Fedora is the real beta test system for stuff that they are considering putting into the next RHEL.

RHEL 8 is the current production version, so current versions of Fedora are being used to test software that may or may not appear in the next version of RHEL, that being version 9.

After December 31, Centos (now renamed Centos Stream) will be used to test the next upgrade for stuff that will appear in the current version of RHEL, that being version 8 at this time.

Centos was formerly a slavish copy of RHEL with the name and logos changed to say Centos. Rocky Linux is now doing what Centos has been doing to this point; it's a slavish copy of RHEL with the name and logos changed to say Rocky.

In the future, Centos Stream users will get updates to software that will probably be distributed to RHEL users at some point in the nearish future. Rocky users will get updates anywhere from a few days to a few weeks after Red Hat issues an update for RHEL depending on how long it takes the guys to recompile what they got from Red Hat and get it out the door.

One of the issues with Centos Stream is that since EPEL builds against RHEL anyone running Stream may be in for a certain amount of grief when and if stuff from EPEL is out of sync with Stream. That wouldn't likely be an insurmountable problem but it has a certain amount pain-in-the-ass potential that folks like me who just want to say "Work, damn it!" and have it work (damn it!) will be just as happy to avoid.

The Rocky conversion script is as slick as... well, something really slick. So the process of changing over is about as painless as it could possibly be, and that suits me fine as well.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I recently moved from Centos to Alma Linux which, like Rocky, is very similar to the old Centos.

https://almalinux.org/

Harold

[Frank Cox]

All of the rats (including me) do seem to be deserting the ship. I wonder if Red Hat's new idea to turn Centos users into beta testers will end with them holding an empty bag.

[Scott Norwood]

IBM kind of screwed the pooch when they bought Red Hat. The demise of CentOS is just a symptom of this. So much for the promise of patches and bug fixes through 2029.

But, yes, the conversion script to Rocky works well. EPEL and everything else work fine, too.

CentOS was very popular in the HPC community (among other places) and everyone there seems to be moving to Rocky.

As for Fedora, it has the advantage of getting new stuff quickly, but has a very short support life cycle for each release. I don't know anyone who uses or used CentOS Stream, but it also has a short life cycle. One of the big selling points for Red Hat (and formerly CentOS, now Rocky) is the long support cycle (about ten years). No other mainstream Linux distribution offers this.

[Van Dalton]

Enterprise Linux. The clue is in the name.

N...C...C one...seven...oh...one; no bloody A, B, C *or* D?

[Marcel Birgelen]

All of the rats (including me) do seem to be deserting the ship. I wonder if Red Hat's new idea to turn Centos users into beta testers will end with them holding an empty bag.

My biggest gripe with all of this is that IBM/RedHat has managed to further splinter the Linux community. If they wanted to get rid of the burden CentOS was to them, why not properly transfer the project to a new set of maintainers? Now you see people moving to all kinds of "CentOS compatible" distributions...

[Frank Cox]

I suspect they just thought that everyone would stay with Centos Stream through inertia since switching to a different distribution has always been a big pain in the ass. If they could maintain the existing base of Centos users and start using that base as a testbed for RHEL, then the value to Red Hat might increase over what it is now (or more accurately what it was two years ago).

That, of course, didn't happen and everyone just started heading for the exits instead. And when clever little scripts like migrate2rocky.sh come along to remove most of the pain in the ass factor, the stampede just accelerated even more.

Unfortunately, at this point it's probably too late for Red Hat to change course.

History may repeat itself, though. In years past there were many different RHEL-compatible Linux distributions (White Box Linux, Scientific Linux, etc.) and over the course of time many of them sort of consolidated and merged into Centos. Today we have Rocky, Alma, Springdale, Oracle and probably others that I can't think of off the top of my head. With the exception of Oracle, I can see the others consolidating into the one distribution to rule them all once again over the next few years.

[Randy Stankey]

Years ago, I used this thing called "Puppy Linux" which could fit on a USB flash drive and ran almost entirely in the computer's RAM.

I kept it on a flash drive attached to my key ring. I liked it because it was "MY" system where nobody could mess with my stuff without prying it out of my cold, dead hands but I could still use it almost anywhere I went. I could walk into almost anybody's office, pop in the USB stick, do my business then pull out the USB when I was done.

People would freak out when they saw their computer change to a different OS and nervously ask, "What are you doing?"
I said, "Nothing... Just restart the computer..."

I'd finish my business, pull out the USB then casually walk out while the person sat there, staring at their computer screen with a blank expression on their face.

I like Linux because computers are supposed to do my bidding. Not the other way around like Windows and MacOS work. It's no harder to use Linux than any other OS but it puts the human back in control of the technology.

For cripe's sake! I had my 70 year old mother using Ubuntu Linux on a crappy, old Dell, Piece-O-Crap computer that I had rescued from the dumpster at work!
Now, I have her using a nice, little iMac that purrs along, nicely and does everything she wants out of a computer but, to this day, she will NOT go back to Windoze!

All I did was just show her the light!

I like using Linux and I often used Fedora along with others that I mentioned. I even had my old snow white iBook computer, 2001 vintage, running on a system called Yellow Dog. When the computer couldn't be updated past MacOS 10.3, Yellow Dog helped me keep that computer running for a couple more years past its expiration date with nary a hiccup.

I just wish that people would get that crappy FUD out of their heads because thinking like that does nobody any good.