The past 21 of June was launched one of the many alternatives to CentOS that emerged after Red Hat decided to turn this distribution into a kind of beta of RHEL. The interesting thing about Rocky Linux is that its manager is none other than Gregory Kurtzer, co-founder of the CentOS project.
Rocky Linux 8.4 available. Download it before it runs out
The new distribution, built from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 source code, is being quite popular. According to Kurtzer on Linkedin:
In just 12 hours, we have counted almost 0 downloads of the Rocky Linux GA installation media from our Tier3 mirror. If we extrapolate the count to include our other replicas, we'll probably be at least 4-XNUMX times as many (if not even much more)!
There are many reports from people and organizations that are already replacing their CentOS systems (and even other Linux distributions) with Rocky. The media is speculating and business analysts also personally validate that Rocky Linux pro
nto could be the most widely used Linux operating system in the enterprise and the cloud!
The good news for Spaniards is that they have a local mirror, which reduces download time. The Spanish cloud service provider Stackscale, which currently has three data centers in Madrid and two in Amsterdam, became one of the first public Rocky Linux mirrors in Spain and the Netherlands. To support the new distribution, Stackscale has provided two mirrors to the project, one in the public Stackscale mirror. in Madrid and another in Stackscale's public mirror on Amsterdam.
Institutional support for the project
Like many other open source projects, Rocky Linux is powered by a foundation that ensures the new distribution is always available to the community. Moreover, Kurtzer created a company to give payment support to clients in sectors such as defense and government, the media, pharmaceuticals, high-performance computing (HPC), and scientific research.
After a 7-month development, Rocky Linux is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architecture hardware in various ISOs. It can also be found on the Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services platforms. Also container images in Docker.hub and Quay.io
The Rocky Linux project
Rocky linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to be 100% compatible with the leading Linux distribution for business (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) previously that role was fulfilled by CentOS, but, Red Hat He decided transform it into a trial version of RHEL.
When the project was born, CentOS worked as a top-down build of its upstream provider (it incorporated patches and updates after the upstream provider did). After the changes it became a bottom-up build (testing patches and updates before inclusion in the bottom-up provider). To make matters worse, support for CentOS Linux 8 has been shortened, from May 31, 2029 to December 31, 2021.
This caused discomfort among corporate users including large companies such as Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota, Verizon, and almost all web hosting providers.
Rocky Linux will then act as a top-down compilation adding the changes after Red Hat does.
Unfortunately I could not find a list of the included software, but, it must be taken into account that since it is a distribution focused on the corporate market, the focus is more on stability than at present.
It's too early to tell if the initial curiosity will morph into a permanent user base. There are other alternatives that aim to take over the scepter of CentOS. Alma Linux was launched in March of this year, powered by CloudLinux, a paid distribution for web hosting services. On the other hand, Oracle and SUSE also developed strategies to attract these disgruntled customers. And, Red Hat itself expanded the scope of its free licenses.