Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.
— Gregory Kurtzer, Founder
I am not even sure what is going on.
1. The Name has a meaning. As shown in the quote above. And it is tribute / honour to a founder, from a previously well known project ( CentOS )
2. That meaning and the linkage in itself is extremely marketable. Especially to the target audience which are using CentOS.
3. This message explaining its meaning has been there since Day 1 according to Github history.
4. But more than half of the comments ( 150 ) are pissing on its name.
5. Which suggest that either a) They didn't actually click on the link and read anything or b) They dont like name for whatever reason.
6. I will be judgemental, and I am willing to bet those who are complaining about the name has never done any professional marketing or sales for any decent period of time.
Having said all that, they are still entitled to their opinion. But it also shows why product development and marketing based on surveying doesn't really work.
It's widely accepted nowadays, it was pretty weird in 2004. I got my fair share of jokes in 2005-2007 from friends when talking about that "ubuntu" thing, and I'll spare you the examples.
A zillion times better than trying to explain what a "Suse", an "Ubuntu", or a "Manjaro" is, and that's before talking about the various types of hat-based distros.
Hell, my grocery store sells sausage bites made by Dietz & Watson that are called "Dietz Nuts".
Names are not destiny.
CentOS failed twice, it ran out of money in 2014 and was rescued back then by Redhat sponsership. Again in 2020. Another widely used RHEL respin was Scientific Linux which mothballed when RHEL 7 was released.
There seems to be lots of potential users but not lots of potential money for a RHEL respin.
1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones. It would be trivial to just put the actual RHEL8 iso as an unsupported download on their ftp/www server and sell the support separately, like Oracle or Canonical do. Instead, they kept this ridiculous make work project called CentOS around, that involved non-trivial manual labor meticulously rebranding RHEL into RedHat owned CentOS-the-laggard-RHEL-clone, whose users apparently mainly value it for being as close to RHEL as possible without paying. To a distant observer, the whole setup looks quite absurd. I think it's actually good that they finally put an end to it. But they should have either not started CentOS 8 at all or rode it out till the end. Pulling the plug at 20% of it's lifetime is plainly a shitty move.
2. It appears that building a legal RHEL8+ clone is quite a task, and I'm guessing the amount of work involved is largely controlled by Red Hat Inc. I.e., they can make running/maintaining a project like Rocky or others more and more expensive if they choose to. I believe they going to test the limits of how difficult they can make building from their sources within the boundaries of the GPL. If you think I'm wrong, just put up a mirror of the RHEL8 (not CentOS8) SRPMs and see how long it stays up. Clearly they're not acting in the spirit of the GPL, even if they are in the letter.
3. Given the previous points, I believe any project like Rocky is a losing proposition. If the "community" really values enterprise stability so much, better put the effort into an extra-stable-extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu, and preparing for transition away from RHEL. Or just pay up, if you really believes the RHEL stability is so valuable. Clone projects are by necessity extremely dependent on actions of Red Hat Inc which has largely opposite interests. I don't know why people would volunteer for that.
The GPL doesn't require you make the sources public to everybody, just the people to whom you are distributing your software.
But Red Hat does provide sources, to everybody. They go above and beyond what the GPL actually requires.
I've always thought of Debian LTS as basically the end all be all of Linux server OS stability (let's ignore the BSDs for this exercise), is the main draw of CentOS over that just the longer LTS period or is it also meaningfully more stable?
But [they do](https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download). A subscription buys you updates and support. RHEL itself is free. In addition, considering that almost all of Red Hat's products are "upstream first", branding is generally a single additional RPM which changes some colors. It is _not_ hard to rebrand RHEL
> 2. It appears that building a legal RHEL8+ clone is quite a task, and I'm guessing the amount of work involved is largely controlled by Red Hat Inc. I.e., they can make running/maintaining a project like Rocky or others more and more expensive if they choose to. I believe they going to test the limits of how difficult they can make building from their sources within the boundaries of the GPL. If you think I'm wrong, just put up a mirror of the RHEL8 (not CentOS8) SRPMs and see how long it stays up. Clearly they're not acting in the spirit of the GPL, if they are in the letter.
The only case in which this has happened is changing the packaging of the kernel-sources SRPM so Oracle could not pick and choose particular patches, and instead had to deal with a single massive diff to make stuff like kpatch work. The "expensive" part of building an EL8 clone is standing up a bunch of Koji builders. That isn't necessary either, strictly. It just makes "turn this SRPM into an RPM and combine it with a bunch of others into a temporary repo we can dogfood/release" easier. As always, it comes down to cost.
> 3. Given the previous point, I believe a project like Rocky is a losing proposition. If the "community" really values enterprise stability so much, better put the effort into an extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu, and preparing for transition away from RHEL. Or just pay up, if you really believes the RHEL stability is so valuable. Clone projects are by necessity extremely dependent on actions of Red Hat Inc which has largely opposite interests. I don't know why people would volunteer for that.
The problem with this, broadly, is that the "community" is comprised of a lot of Red Hat-employed engineers. This idea that Linux is a bunch of "community" people that RH/IBM/whomever siphon off is completely fallacious. Sure, they exist, but the vast majority of Linux development is commercial. Some bug is reported in a downstream product that a customer pays for, or a feature is requested by a major customer (or the technical debt involved in maintaining something gets too high, or whatever), and professional engineers who are being paid to work on it write the patches upstream. Once they're merged, they get picked downstream into some kind of productized version.
Given that most of that happens in Fedora (or OKD, or oVirt, or whatever upstream is for a given product), CentOS being run by RH was pretty much the same embrace+extend+extinguish philosophy. The vast majority of RH engineers run Fedora, or an EL clone, and that isn't gonna change. What's different is that RHEL is no longer a growing revenue stream, and CentOS users didn't convert to RHEL at a large rate (or they reported CentOS bugs against RHEL, which is strictly against Red Hat's support policy).
What customers values is indemnity and the ability to point their finger at someone external, plus normal stuff like a security response team and responsible+timely disclosure during major CVEs. What the community value(d|s) is the ability to run commercial software that the vendor supports on RHEL without actually _paying_ for RHEL. It's not that they value 'enterprise stability'. It's that they value being able to run SAS or whatever without hacking the hell out of the installer. That isn't offered by an extra-LTS fork of Debian or Ubuntu, and no amount of complaining on Hackernews is gonna change that.
Why does Red Hat release everything as source RPMs, and not, say, one big tarball of sources which would still meet the source requirement of the GPL?
> Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed.
But the terrific thing about the GPL, for all its flaws and despite its crazy founder, is that it ensures the health and longevity of a project despite well-funded attacks against it.
Whatever replaces it either needs a better business model (to pay for maintenance, RHEL, Ubuntu) or more community involvement (work for free, Debian). But when you’re effectively repackaging another distro, it’s probably hard to get other people excited enough to help.
CentOS is actually Red Hat's greatest advertisement
If IBM Red Hat wanted to push for RHEL upgrades, they should have changed the CentOS support window from 10 years to 3-5 years. If they had to wind back the EOL for CentOS date from 2029, they should have at least move it back to eg, 2024 not 2021.
nah, it's not missing. Red Hat bought the project and more importantly the trademark, domains etc.
And it was mostly fine.
Then IBM bought Red Hat and things went south.
CentOS did not fail, CentOS was killed. It's different.
I think IBM had nothing to do with this one. People think Red Hat won't do anything like this. However, there exists a part of Red Hat which is capable of doing this. That part of Red Hat usually stays behind the scenes and comes to the fore to announce that a decision has been made and the developers (hired within Red Hat as well as the general community) who are involved in the day to day running of the projects will have no say. Plus they will throw in some confusion (like the limited use license that is in the works but not yet ready for CentOS use) around the future of the project being killed just to let the community expect something good to come out of this exercise. This is not new. They did the exact same thing to the JBoss community application server[1].
CentOS just gave everything away for free and then is wondering why they're not making any money.
I really think everyone should just say “fuck this”, abandon it and throw the time at LTS Debian. Red hat control way too much of the ecosystem at the same time so there needs to be a strong, stable, non-commercial alternative.
It did not fail. It succeeded too well! It was impacting RH’s bottom line, so they killed it.
I know mentioning incentives and that people lie is not popular here but when the same thing happens to two different projects you have to be willfully blind to not see a pattern.
As for making it viable long term: a clear goal, community norms and quick removal of anyone not toeing the line.
More likely there'll be a simple script to swap from CentOS (or RHEL) to Rocky.. Or they could have a "rocky-release" package with `Obsoletes: centos-release, redhat-release` and a `yum install https://rockylinux.org/rocky-release-8.2-1.noarch.rpm ; yum upgrade` is all that'd be required to swap...
TL;DR: should be very easy, but there's minor variations in methods that I doubt are finalized.
[0] https://nts.strzibny.name/migrating-centos-to-oracle-linux/
How accurate that is, I don't know.
Other RHEL-compatible distros offer it, I believe.
I would think that rebranding CentOS as Rocky is a rather trivial process of replatforming all the codebase and replacing any “Centos” with “Rocky”.
In short, forking it is easy, but keep it attractive is not.
I mean, if you think about it, all that's really needed is for a "s/CentOS/Rocky/g" over all of the repositories. Then, the other 99% of the project is just waiting for the packages to rebuild and get sync'd on all of the mirrors that they could just will into existence with their minds.
Really, though, let's be honest here: If they weren't spending so much time writing up press releases and commenting on issues on GitHub, they probably could've already basically been done, the new package repositories could've been published and mirrored, and half of the CentOS 8 boxes out there could've already been migrated over.
<sigh>
--
EDIT: To be clear, I am not serious. I thought the question I was replying to was completely f##king absurd but chose to respond with sarcasm (it seemed less likely to result in a warning from @dang than my initial reply).
Not saying all of the above is trivial but I'd think the code to do it literally exists and is itself open source.
Btw: it doesn't seem to have been ported to RHEL 8 (?).
"This project was started long before CentOS or other projects were available."
I bet the have calculated that their work maintaining this is rather simple and well-worth it, or they would have changed over to CentOS a long time ago.
> The CentOS Marks are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. (“Red Hat”).
Most servers that distribute current binary RPMs are mirrors operated by third parties. You can be reasonably certain that servers like www.centos.org, mirror.centos.org, vault.centos.org, or buildlogs.centos.org are paid for by Red Hat. Their IPs are mostly AWS.
https://www.redhat.com/ja/about/press-releases/red-hat-and-c...
Wow, I haven't been following this very closely - but isn't that Fedora they're describing? At least... traditionally...
Fedora was upstream, RHEL was stabalized in the middle, and CentOS was downstream - regarding patch releases and features, etc.
Is Fedora going away too?
Nope.
- Fedora is cutting edge/desktop.
- CentOS Stream is testing/RC area for RHEL patches.
- RHEL is the stable server for enterprise.
No more than 'current' rhel is testing for centos patches.
I am not sure if this is still the case, but Redhat used to require 100% of its employees to use RHEL Workstation as the desktop.
Also it's interesting that some people defined Rocky as being 'unstable' when others read it as being 'solid as a rock'.
That has to be disappointing for the people who adopted CentOS for its stability and long-term support.
That said, I think the FAQ is missing an answer for a critical question: What ultimately drove CentOS to its regrettable fate and what will Rocky Linux do to avoid a similar misfortune?
One of the things that YC is always talking about is that founders looking for ideas should look to identify situations where most people think it’s going to turn out one way, but most people are wrong and it’s actually going to turn out another way. In the context of the late 90s, where virtually all software was proprietary, they bet on open source software and support plans, and made a sustainable company on it. They contributed to open source so that they would have the expertise, gave all the software away for free, and then sold the expertise through support plans.
And then the business people came along and they’re showing a deep misunderstanding of why Redhat was able to sell support plans in the first place. People on RHEL are going to stay on RHEL, but people on CentOS — the market of people who are not paying customers but could theoretically become customers, are almost certainly going to go to Canonical. This will kill Redhat.
And if that applies to you, that's plenty of time for Rocky Linux to get rolling. Just a thought.
I put together what we actually know about the CentOS -> Stream migration so far[0]. I personally might give stream a chance although if Rocky is released, I imagine it a no-brainer.
[0] https://nts.strzibny.name/migrating-centos-to-centos-stream-...
The most common argument (Oracle is evil and litigious. Therefore, using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued) honestly seems like FUD.
All RHEL downstream distributions rebuild the same SRPMs that RHEL provides. Doing a quick comparison over some common packages (kernel, httpd, openssl, etc.) between CentOS 8.3 (https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/) Oracle Linux 8.3 (https://yum.oracle.com/repo/OracleLinux/OL8/baseos/latest/x8...) shows that they are indeed byte identical (with the exception of certain spec files including debranding patches).
What is the value of having a separate RHEL derivative? It isn't as if the "community" can propose/submit any changes, since any changes will cease to make the downstream distribution a "bug for bug" compatible RHEL derivative. If I actually wanted to participate in the larger RHEL-derivative community, I would need to actually submit my changes to the CentOS stream project.
Devil's response: nobody cares if you do. A lot of people know why they want it; the answer will in many cases be that it will fill the same niche and not be controlled by a shitty company. (If you think calling Oracle shitty is FUD, unprofessional or similar, that's fine: see 'Devil's response', above.)
It will stand or fall on its own, as a result of many different peoples' choices. For now, it is enough that something is growing in the niche from which Centos was uprooted.
Because there's a whole ecosystem (HPC and Scientific computing to be exact) which depends on CentOS (not RHEL, not Oracle, not Ubuntu, not Debian) primarily. A CentOS compatible distribution is not some FOSS pride thing.
IBM and RH really blew a sucker punch in this regard.
It's a bit like if I'm in a party, and I briskly walk up to five people and each time I hit them in the face, and then it's your turn and you move away, and I say "what? the idea that I would hit you is FUD".
It's not FUD. It's a pattern of behaviour.
Avoiding overly litigious companies - where other as-good or better choices exist - is not overly cautious, it's just good sense. Where other as-good choices do not exist, it seems perfectly reasonable (depending on your risk profile) to work with others to create the better choice.
Of course, I say all this as someone who has worked in massive multinational corporations and now work in small startups. I'm now likely never going to use Rocky Linux for exactly the reason you've hinted to - in effect, it is not a usecase either of us care about. But for those people who do need this, I'm very happy that someone has championed the cause.
What I've seen is "Oracle is evil", "don't trust Oracle", and something like "my prior history around Oracle has left such a lasting bad taste that I throw up a little in my mouth every time I touch something with Oracle in it, so I'd rather do almost anything but use something from Oracle, since using it on the daily would inevitably lead to permanent esophagus damage."
I mean... Oracle buying up MySQL was enough for MariaDB to be created and move to being the default. (well, and some of what Oracle did right afterwards).
1. On an entitled system, enable the source repos and download the packages.
2. In your account online, you can download the SRPMs for individual packages.
3. In your account online you can download a minor version release iso of the SRPMs.
4. You can use https://git.centos.org to clone the actual RPM patches/spec files, and use the get_source.sh script from the centos-git-common repo to pull the package source tarballs from dist-git (useful for projects like the kernel that don’t use actual upstream as their source).
With CentOS stream (particularly C9S that will be launching mid 2021) and the switch over to GitLab which will happen in the future, everything will be out in the open in git form.
Because you want what CentOS was and this is basically going to be what CentOS was. Different name, different people, but same prinicple.
This is something I don't think the wider community understands, nor do they understand the incredible amount of work it takes to back-port major kernel/etc features while maintaining a stable kernel ABI as well as userspace ABI. Every single other distribution stops providing feature updates within a year or two. So LTS, really means "old with a few security updates" while RHEL means, will run efficiently on your hardware (including newer than the distro) with the same binary drivers and packages from 3rd party sources for the entire lifespan.
AKA, its more a windows model than a traditional linux distro in that it allows hardware vendors to ship binary drivers, and software vendors to ship binary packages. That is a huge part of why its the most commonly supported distro for engineering tool chains, and a long list of other commercial hardware and software.
I think the gap is the question of how many people there are who want enterprise-style lifetimes but don't actually want support. If you're running servers which don't need a paid support contract, upgrading Debian every 5 years is hardly a significant burden (and balanced by not having to routinely backport packages). There's some benefit to, say, being able to develop skills an employer is looking for but that's not a huge pool of users.
I think this is the reason behind the present situation: CentOS' main appeal was to people who don't want to pay for RHEL, and not enough of those people contribute to support a community. That lead to the sale to Red Hat in the first place and it's unclear to me that anyone else could be more successful with the same pitch.
That said, if you're really in the position of depending on a free project for over five years of security support, you probably will be totally fine with just ignoring the fact it's out of support. Just keep running Debian 6 for a decade, whatever. The code still runs. Pretend you've patched. Sure, there are probably some vulnerabilities, but you haven't actually looked to see if the project you're actually using right now has patched all the known vulnerabilities, have you?
(Spoiler, it hasn't: https://arxiv.org/abs/0904.4058)
CentOS 8 was released few days ago with kernel 4.18, which not even LTS is, and is older than the current Debian stable kernel(!).
If you need to install anything besides the base distro you need elrepo, epel, etc which I'm not sure can be counted as part of the support.
And there is even commercial support for Extended LTS now [2]
Also, it's worth noticing that Debian provides security backports for a significantly larger set of packages and CPU architectures than other distributions.
> Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
> Thus the Debian LTS team takes over security maintenance of the various releases once the Debian Security team stops its work.
I would say a better reason is that while both are Linux distributions, they are distinct dialects and ecosystems. It isn't impossible to switch, but for institutions that have complex infrastructure built around the RHEL world, it is a lot of work to convert.
When I worked for a hardware vendor we had customers who ran hundreds of CentOS boxes in dev/test alongside their production RHEL boxes. If there was an issue with a driver, we simply asked that they reproduce it on RHEL (which was easy to do). If they had been running debian or ubuntu LTS the answer would have been: I suggest you reach out the development mailing list and seek out support there.
Whether you like it or not, most hardware vendors want/require you to have an enterprise support contract on your OS in order to help with driver issues.
There is a large world of proprietary enterprise software that is tested, developed, and supported solely on RHEL. CentOS (and theoretically, Rocky Linux) can run these applications because they are essentially a reskin of RHEL. Debian and Ubuntu LTS cannot (or at least not in a supported state) because they are not RHEL.
I'm not familiar with Debian, do they have same infrastructure and documentation quality as RHEL? For example do they have anything like Koji [1] for easy automated package building?
We used CentOS as dev environments, and RHEL as production. It gave us the best of both worlds; an unsupported but compatible and stable dev environment we could bring up and throw away as much as we wanted _Without_ licensing BS. And when the devs were happy with it, the move of a project to RHEL was easy and uneventful.
And don't even get me started on the 'free' dev version of RHEL. It's a PITA to use, we've tried. It's also why we've halted our RH purchasing for the moment. Sure, it's caused our RHEL reps no end of consternation and stress but too bad. I've been honest with them, and told them that they are probably lying through their teeth (without knowing it) when they parrot the line that RH will have some magic answer for "expanded" and/or "reduced cost" Streams usage in "1st half of 21". That trust died when RH management axed CentOS8 like they did.
The branding stuff was a plus to the sys-admins and Linux die hards.
Most developers use Ubuntu in their laptops. Virtualized on Windows, but Ubuntu nonetheless.
Centos was the rational other free choice, not that Red Hat hasn't made other equally strange decisions.
Sometimes I think we'd be better off rolling our own, like Amazon does.
What is the vision for Rocky Linux?
A solid, stable, and transparent alternative for production environments, developed by the community for the community.
Although I'll be inclined to think of it as series of movies. Perhaps even split wood before installing Rocky 5?
"Thinking back to early CentOS days... My cofounder was Rocky McGaugh. He is no longer with us, so as a H/T to him, who never got to see the success that CentOS came to be, I introduce to you...Rocky Linux"Hmm, to me, "rock" has connotations of "solid", but that ending "y" changes the the connotations completely - "rocky" makes me think of uncertainty, risk and peril.
Seriously though, I am very happy about the name and its creation.
Edit: actually Rocky was the flying squirrel.
If you don’t like the name, launch your own CentOS replacement. There’s no better time than now. If there’s one thing this project does not need right now, it’s armchair marketing experts.
If you do care about a viable CentOS replacement, do something. Contribute code, money or expertise. The last thing any new and vulnerable project needs is another “idea guy” or a new logo.
Without any experience myself (beyond some kernel build maybe 10 years ago), I gathered (from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8) that the majority of work involves manually de-branding the RHEL sources. This apparently can't be automated, as it requires human judgement in which packages/files de-branding is required and in which it might actually break something.
Between major version jumps, e.g. from RHEL/CentOS 7->8 there's apparently also lots of work in getting the build environment up to date.
This raises numerous interesting questions, such as:
1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones?
2. Where / what are CentOS's actual build scripts / tools? Is there some howto or writeup how to make a CentOS iso (or cloud-image) on my own PC after downloading the source tree?
3. Do CentOS devs go through the entire manual de-branding exercise with every minor/major update? Presumably they are using some sort of automation/scripting/diffing somewhere. Are these processes/tools available or documented anywhere?
I hope at some point someone with some actual knowledge about this can chime in.
Red Hat publishes it's sources on https://git.centos.org. Those are then used to build CentOS Linux packages.
In the future they'll do their development there, and build CentOS Stream and Red Hat Packages from there.
See also: https://crunchtools.com/before-you-get-mad-about-the-centos-...
> Remember, the source code at git.centos.org is basically read only, downstream code from RHEL. That’s how Red Hat complies with the GPL. Technically we go above and beyond because we are only legally required to provide code to customers, and not required to provide code for BSD/Apache/etc licensed code, only attribution.
Regarding question 2, CentOS has a somewhat custom build system for each major version afaik, for 8 this would be https://koji.mbox.centos.org/koji/
How'd they used to do it then? I assume they just became a subscriber?
Edit: just thought about it, couldn't they get them from CentOS? Would be pretty funny.
(It’s not ancient. I made it up. But it’s sadly true.)
This is the reason why many excellent projects remain obscure while marketing-driven products become famous... and often take credit for other people's ideas.
I mean, it’s Linux.
I'm confused why everyone is complaining about the "Rocky" part, which is a nice tribute and sounds pretty decent, when the actual problem is the "Linux" part. It should really be called "Rocky GNU/Linux", or "Rocky GNU+Linux", because the Linux kernel is only one component of a complete GNU-based operating system compatible with the POSIX standard.
It's called Linux because GNU is awful at naming things. The name "Gahnoo" is too awkward to pronounce and "Gahnoo plus Linux" is too long.
People shorten names for convenience. Deal with it or come up with a better name than GNU.
It's all grounded human nature I'm sure, but man it is terrible.
We all are frustrated by that behavior ourselves, why do it to other people?
Bikeshedding-type comments come to dominate conversations because they take less time and effort to compose and express, and therefore tend to get in ahead of and (especially in a synchronous communication medium) crowd out more substantive contributions. While the expertise and temperament of the individual conversation participants may be contributing factors, the dominant one is simply the size of the group.
After a while, it's hard to refrain from telling people to just screw off.
edit: Personally, I've been a heavy user and supporter of CentOS but I've almost never referred to it as CentOS. Because the point is to be binary compatible with RHEL, and it's then naturally almost the same thing as Oracle Linux and Scientific Linux, etc. So I would simply refer to "EL5" or "EL6" in code or other places. This probably won't be any different.
As if questioning whether a project name is any good suddenly equates to an application to be an "idea guy" or a logo designer.
If you don't like the majority opinion about something as trivial as a name, stop visiting this forum. Does that advice sound familiar? Perhaps it doesn't feel fair for someone to offer you only one of 2 extremes? Hmmmm.
The last thing this forum needs is another open source warrior patronizing everyone for participating here.
1: https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa.exe?A2=SCIENTIFIC-LINUX...
Happy to help wherever I can.
- Fedora does its thing informed by but somewhat independently of RHEL.
- Red Hat chooses a Fedora release to be the base of RHEL, forks it, and starts working on it.
- This eventually becomes RHEL X.
- Red Hat then forks RHEL X to create the RHEL X.0 Beta and eventually the RHEL X.0 release. RHEL X keeps getting work done on it which eventually lead to another fork which creates RHEL X.1 Beta and RHEL X.1.
- After each RHEL X.y is released CentOS starts the process of rebuilding it from the sources and tracking upstream changes.
The new model puts CentOS where RHEL X is and so RHEL X.y are actually forks of CentOS.
This change matters a lot to you if you care a lot about the difference between the minor releases of RHEL because there won't be CentOS 7.1 CentOS 7.3 but just CentOS 7. If you just yum update on CentOS then you probably don't care since by default it will move you up minor versions. You have to try to stay on a specific minor version.
What's nice about this change is that anyone can peel off releases from CentOS the same way Red Hat will do to make RHEL and new features become available when they're ready instead of being batched.
RHEL requires expensive licenses. CentOS was RHEL without the RedHat branding and without the expensive licensing.
By design, there was a nearly complete overlap between RHEL and CentOS. By "repurposing" CentOS into a "rolling release", RedHat (IBM) has broken the overlap so CentOS (free licensing) no longer competes directly against RHEL (expensive licensing).
Since branding is so important this really seems like something that should go through focus groups or crowd sources somehow? Maybe a poll on hacker news? Unfortunately, I really think changing the name would be critical to the success of the project. Imagine you are a technical lead and you have to convince your boss to switch from RHEL to Rocky Linux...
Edit: I know the name is in tribute to Rocky McGaugh, but I still think "Rock Solid Linux" "named in tribute to CentOs co-founder Rocky McGaugh" would make the project more successful
I work on servers used in VFX rendering pipelines and some software will simply refuse to properly run if I don't give it at least a CentOS. And if I do manage to get it running on Debian/Ubuntu, automatically I'm voiding the company's support because I'm using an 'unsupported Linux distribution'.
sux.
- The old CentOS had a brand value, which Rocky Linux has to earn back all over again.
- The old Red Hat was nice to CentOS or at least wasn't particularly hostile. That does not mean IBM will be nice too.
- It may be too short a notice for current CentOS users to wait for Rocky Linux to come through. They may already move away to other alternatives like Debian or Ubuntu or Amazon Linux or whatever fits their use case.
- If because of some miracle, Rocky Linux turns out to be just as successful as CentOS, there is a chance that either Red Hat or a competitor will end up taking control of it too. Corporate sponsorship is too lucrative to decline. So, it will end up with the same fate as CentOS.
Red Hat was not nice to CentOS when it was new.
The "same fate" as CentOS would mean surviving for 16 years.
Same fate as CentOS, let me think... Can I replace a few system packages to convert it to a binary-compatible, patchable, community-supported distro, just differently branded? Okay, count me in.
CentOS users by nature want to stay on their current systems as long as possible. Many would have still been on CentOS 7. I doubt any will have moved away from CentOS already.
Spending my time fixing problems instead of doing actual work is fun, for a while.
Every damn time I start this one laptop with Linux, trying to get away from Windows 10, there's something to fix.
Oh, the undervolt is not being applied, time to build the whole thing again.
Oh, restart causes it to wank the hard drive indefinitely for some reason.
Oh, shutdown is still not working, glad I got a power button.
Nouveau glitches.
Bluetooth has disconnected and just refuses to work again.
Audio recording is not working again.
Video encoding is not working again.
Video playback is not working again...
And it runs so well in a virtual machine.
Why can't people just band together and create one good Linux distro for the desktop. Rhetorical question, I guess.
This fills a specific need for "enterprise" customers, specifically, being very slow and very stable. It's not supposed to be a consumer OS for doing normal desktop activities on, although there's nothing stopping you from using it as such.
This isn't yet another slightly tweaked fork of Ubuntu or Arch Linux or some such, where maybe that attitude is more deserved.
In terms of DE. More focus and hard work is on building something "cool" than something stable and less buggy. I would have been happy with Gnome if the base OS is stable. Yes KDE turned out to be better, but that was the least important of all cases. Lots of work hours have gone into making XFCE, LXQT, KDE, Gnome, Guix, Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate etc etc. The choice argument is futile if I or someone cannot be productive in it and spends time in linux forums. 100 Choices will never make open source more popular. You just need 1 damn good choice that "just works". Time and energy is precious.
As much as Windows is criticised, you will rarely have any issues with it in terms of hardware compatibility.
Coming to Rocky-Linux, this is server side offering. Plus its model is different to general desktop linux you use for day-to-day.
You never hear anyone install macOS on a Dell and wonder why it isn’t working.
So why are you doing this for Linux?
Lenovo, Dell, and other manufacturers ship products that are fully supported by Linux. Use those. If you don’t, you’re on your own.
While your experiences with the desktop are unfortunate, on most common laptops (cheap and expensive ones) most Linux distros run well, even if some very specific devices have issues with the kernel drivers
It is less a standalone distro and more a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
> Nouveau glitches.
Then why are you using it? As much work as people are putting into nouveau, they have to work more often than not against NVIDIA instead of with. If you want a system that works just use the proprietary driver.
> Why can't people just band together and create one good Linux distro for the desktop.
In this case? commercial interest, people used CentOS in production instead of buying Red Hat Enterprise. So the people in charge decided to make it useless for that. Now we have Rocky to do the same, just with people in charge that are not financially connected to Red Hat.
You don't like my design choices? I'll leave the project and make my own. You end up with lots of talented people reinventing the same thing forever.
Different users, different needs. Ubuntu and Archlinux definitely appeal to different people, for example.
One person might also use different distros depending on the intended use of a particular machine.
1. It's a mountain of work and loads of people involved are doing it in their limited spare time.
2. It's even more of a mountain of work because Linux developers have to write all the hardware drivers themselves too. On Windows drivers tend to be written by device manufacturers but that rarely happens on Linux because it's very difficult to write closed source drivers and they have fewer Linux users anyway.
3. A large proportion of Linux users and developers have drunk the Unix kool-aid and think that everything should stay exactly as it was in the 70s. Text based config files, services controlled by Bash scripts, etc. It's pretty much impossible to make a reliable modern system with Bluetooth, WiFi, external displays, hotplugging, etc. with that attitude.
4. Hardware makers only test on Windows so some of the bugs in stuff like suspend are probably hardware bugs that Windows happens not to trigger.
Why not just Rock Linux ? If you want corporate customers, use a corporate name.
To those who disagree, would you be comfortable telling your board of directors that you use "insert offensive word" Linux ?
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`--{__________) \/ "Berkeley Unix Daemon"— Gregory Kurtzer, Founder of Rocky Linux and Co-founder of CentOS
It's written in Repo's README
I agree. I mean, who would take something called "Red Hat" seriously?
Ignore the peanut gallery, it is a fine name.
That seems a pretty specious argument for not using a product.
Especially since the name was used to honor one of the founders of CentoS who is now dead.
That seems like a pretty good reason for a name to me.
What's more, I'd be more concerned about functionality than a name. But that's just me.