Rocky Linux 8.8 Available Now | Hacker News Reader

Rocky Linux 8.8 Available Now

rockylinux.org

36 pointsmikece39 comments

This is interesting.

I use archlinux as my daily linux driver, but for server it is not ideal as it is a bit fragile to upgrade (for example, if you have postgresql installed, an update can put a new version and you have to migrate your db and if you keep the old version, some .so might get updated and it won't start).

This could be a solution for servers. I used to use FreeBSD for servers instead of linux, but some softwares I have to deploy are not compatible with BSD which saddens me.

Run postgres in a container with the proper tag and you'll be fine. I run my homelab on OpenSuse MicroOS which is a rolling release with immutable filesystem and that's what I do for software I need to stay at specific versions.

I've been running Arch on all my personal computers for about 8 years now, including a low power server in my garage. It's true that there's the occasional issue to work out after updating, but overall I'd say I've come out ahead simply from never having the need or urge to wipe my filesystem and start fresh. I currently have upgrade anxiety about my work laptop that's still running Ubuntu 20.04.

My most personally nefarious Arch update glitch happened recently. Flatpak support quietly pulled in pipewire, but I already had pulseaudio installed. Apparently they're not mutually exclusive even though they're redundant and incompatible unless you explicitly configure them properly. So, I had a month or two where my audio "worked" but dynamic sink switching was really unreliable. Once I figured it out, I just uninstalled pulseaudio and configured pipewire properly in its place.

The only other one I can remember, in the past 8 years, was a new major PHP version breaking my web page's CMS. That was mostly my CMS's fault for being both obscure and horribly out of date.

Yeah, pulse/jack/pipewire was a bit of a mess. But since 2023, pipewire can replace both and works very well. At least with my hardware.

I actually DO use arch on my personal servers and never had any problem, I was also able to always fix the OS. But I have a new project starting where I will host more sensible stuff and I am wondering what I'll use. I might just use arch with N+1 machines and use the +1 to test upgrades.

For servers I've been using Ubuntu LTS ever since CentOS died, but this might bring me back.

Look at AlmaLinux also. I'm not sure of any technical reason why you'd chose one over the other, but AlmaLinux is a public non-profit with a board, Rocky ownership is a private org.

https://almalinux.org/

I moved everything to UbuntuLTS also, and I'm not moving again. But if I had waited, and I sort of wish I had, I'd probably be moving to Alma.

Not being familiar with CentOS or "Enterprise Linux", I wish their website explained a bit more about what Rocky Linux is in terms of features or functionality. The about page mainly just talks about the legacy of the name. The FAQ's first question isn't, "What is Rocky Linux", or "Who is Rocky Linux for?"

Piecing it together based on a single sentence I stumbled on then did some Google searching, it sounds like Rocky Linux is a non-commercial drop-in replacement for Red Hat. So I guess it's for folk that want to migrate from Red Hat, or duplicate its functionality, but don't want or need paid support?

While that's super valid, they are catering to existing CentOS users who are being forced to find an alternative since CentOS was discontinued. I'm not surprised that they aren't focused on trying to bring in new users, they've got a lot of work to do and the userbase already exists.

Well you could argue the name needs some explanation. The first time I heard it my mind immediately jumped to the dictionary definition of the word rocky - "difficult and full of obstacles or problems."

It seems like a fine name. I personally didn't link it to that connotation, and instead initially thought of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and a distant relative of a past generation. For all I know the honored co-founder was a curmudgeon, so maybe it's an especially clever pun?

If I were tasked with improving the about page, I would probably use the about page to explain the purpose and merits of the operating system. I would move the explanation of the name to the first question in the FAQ, or to a separate "Rocky's Legacy" page. Mainly, it would depend on whether the guy was known to be modest or proud. Then that section could be a true tribute without any risk of compromising the readability of the site.

There is a bit of history behind it and other Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. Originaly there was CentOS which was the "open source" / free version of RHEL. It was known for stability and reliability as a Linux distro for enterprise applications. CentOS was also 1-1, bug-for-bug replacement for RHEL.

This was good for a long time, but Red Hat dropped support for CentOS a few years back and stopped updating it. So Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, and others popped up to replace CentOS.

CentOS was nice for two reasons:

1. Big "enterprise" software would run on it because it was basically RedHat.

2. It had an exceptionally long support cycle, so you could setup a machine and ignore it for ten years.

To clarify your second point -- you can maintain security fixes for 10 years without having to worry about random changes that may break your installed apps and workflows.

Which it did, quite often. There would often be bugs that existed between kernel 2.6.300 and 2.6.336 or some nonsense. The idea is nice, but in practice all of that backporting just seemed like a lot of work for not much benefit.

Rocky and CentOS are both based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

CentOS used to be a free and open source downstream version of RHEL. Keeping the history short: Red Hat effectively acquired CentOS and discontinued it as a downstream version of RHEL. They turned it into 'CentOS Stream', which is, more or less, a continuously delivered upstream version of RHEL. This isn't acceptable for a large number of the CentOS user base.

One of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, started Rocky as an alternative. It's basically what CentOS used to be: a free and open source downstream version of RHEL.

Huh, that's interesting. Isn't Fedora the upstream version of Red Hat already? Or is the main distinction that CentOS Stream is rolling release?

I'm pretty much on the complete opposite end of the Linux ecosystem, working primarily on embedded systems.

Fedora's more playground / cutting edge technology demonstrator for Redhat developers. Anything showing up in Fedora won't be included in RHEL for several years, assuming everything goes well.

CENTOS Stream slots in between Fedora and RHEL, keeping a bit ahead of the RHEL stable release.

https://rockylinux.org/ :

  Rocky Linux is an open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. It is under intensive development by the community.

It's the only above the fold text on the home page.

The About page is

  ...Red Hat announced that they would discontinue development of CentOS, which has been a production-ready downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux,... In response, ... he would again start a project to achieve the original goals of CentOS.

You know, I never ended up navigating to that main page. There wasn't an option for it anywhere in the drop down menu at the top, or in all the options at the bottom. As far as I can tell, the only link to it is the logo graphic? So maybe all they need to do is add a "main page" option to the menu and it will be more ergonomic?

While it might be the case that many websites have a dedicated "home" menu item, I think even more websites use the pattern of the corner logo serving as such, to the point that if a site offers both, I'm using the logo every time. It's one of those things that perhaps verges on anti-pattern in discoverability, but is so ubiquitous that most people probably don't even think about whether that's true or not.

CentOS was, as you say, a community developed drop-in replacement for RedHat RHEL that subsumed a number of earlier RPM-based distributions in the early-mid 2000s. It was _widely_ used: in the 2010s the CentOS install base was on the same scale as Debian.

The CentOS governance structure and trademarks were effectively absorbed by RedHat, Inc in 2014.

In 2020 RedHat unilaterally "refocused" CentOS from being essentially "Community RHEL" to being "CentOS Stream" which is more or less a stability channel somewhere between Fedora and RHEL. This doesn't suit the needs of many folks who were running CentOS, and was done so abruptly that they even broke support window promises on the current release at the time, so it generated some bad feelings.

AlmaLinux and RockyLinux are projects that promptly spun up to replace CentOS in the "Community RHEL" role, from different prominent members of the community: Alma from CloudLinux, Inc. and Rocky from Greg Kurtzer of [CentOS cofounder,Warewulf,Singularity/AppTainer, CIQ] fame.

I don't know all the inside politics, but the reason there are two appears to be partly related to concerns about governance structure to prevent another round of commercial capture of community resources.

I don’t have any numbers to back me up— just a hunch and from my own experiences in the industry, I would think that in the 2010’s the install base of Debian would have paled in comparison to CentOS (this would be on the interwebs of course). I don’t know that you could say that they were on the same scale, with my suspicion that CentOS was way more prevalent.

I’d be interested in stats on that from 2010s, and now. I’d even suspect that even today, EL as a whole might outnumber Debian, but perhaps not Ubuntu or Debian/Ubuntu combined (even notwithstanding the rise of containers).

I was going by this low hanging chart from the server market: https://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popula... which seems credible with my memories from industry buddies at the time.

Though, as you allude, I bet a lot of CentOS installations aren't as visible, given its prevalence in things like compute clusters, dev systems, and that sort of thing.

(I have no horse in the race, my personal day-to-day use machines are mostly Arch boxes, and I regularly work on both Debian and CentOS-transitioning-to-Rocky machines.)

Thanks for the link! Seems as though Debian was more popular than I realized on the internet..

> The about page mainly just talks about the legacy of the name.

"On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that they would discontinue development of CentOS, which has been a production-ready downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favor of a newer upstream development variant of that operating system known as "CentOS Stream". In response, original founder of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, announced via a comment on the CentOS website that he would again start a project to achieve the original goals of CentOS."

I think the very first paragraph on the about page just about sums it up. It's a production-ready downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Looking at the release notes, it's still the Linux kernel 4.18, and for the upcoming 9.1 it is only 5.14. Are there any RHOS-like distros with recent kernels like 5.19 and 6+?

If you want something much newer in the rpm/rh based world, you run Fedora.

elrepo has lts and mainline kernel packages http://elrepo.org/tiki/HomePage#elrepo-kernel

I don't think a newer kernel is needed in a server distro such as this.

You'll need to wait for RHEL 10 :)

It's worth noting that Red Hat backports newer hardware support and some functionality to its new kernels, so in practice it is not as out of date as the version may imply.

ELRepo has upstream kernels for all Enterprise Linux compatibles.

Also, the Rocky Linux SIG/Kernel group may even provide an alternative ISO(s) with those upstream kernels at periodic intervals. If you (or anyone else) is interested in helping with that, jump into https://chat.rockylinux.org and join that special interest group.

SHAMELESS PLUG: CIQ (my company) also has an upstream optimized kernel that we support provided via Mountain (our operating system delivery platform).

Which is the defacto one to use? alma Linux or Rocky?

CERN went with AlmaLinux along with many other big names.

I remember when CERN stopped supporting Scientific Linux, probably because CentOS was doing such a good job.

Currently I think Alma, all the companies (and Fermilab (which used to maintain another RHEL clone)) seem to have gone with Alma.

That said, in theory, it's irrelevant: bug-for-bug compatibility and all that.

That That said if I was going to install one on a laptop I'd choose Rocky because it feels vaguely less commercial and I appreciate that.

My company went with Rocky. We are almost finished migrating production hosts from CentOS.

This is like asking if Python or Ruby is the defacto language.

Alma have consistently released the new upstream versions faster than Rocky, so I have decided to go for them. Both distros are essentially just debranded copies of RHEL, so IMHO the choice needs to come down to which organization you have more faith it.

At the moment, there is no "defacto", as both provide significant value.

As others have said, Alma has been awesome and blazingly fast on releases, both Rocky and Alma are very fast on security/errata updates, and Rocky has been excellent on testing/QA (as our identification of a pretty major PPC bug demonstrates).

Rocky has always been 100% open with all development and community involvement with every part of the process and always reproducible by others. While this is does add a bit of latency in the build and release process, we believe always having a diverse community involved is well worth the tradeoff.

Where we can do better? ... Messaging! I've become a personal target since starting Rocky, so I tend to not engage directly anymore. Luckily, we do have a new community team lead, and she seriously ROCKS!

It is necessary for the community to always have alternatives. This is what will ensure that an open source Enterprise Linux alternative will exist for everyone.

It is amazing to be part of this and we would love to have you and others join us and check it out for yourself: https://chat.rockylinux.org.

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