Rocky Linux, the answer to the chaos
The Chaos
Late in 2020, the Linux community and especially those bound with CentOS were surprised by RedHat (The actual owner of CentOS), which announced changes in their product release cycle, turning CentOS into an upstream version of RHEL (RedHat’s operating system that is paid), in very simple words: The CentOS death. What a shock!
CentOS, Community Enterprise Operating System, was a successful Linux distribution community-driven and free. Its success relays on the fact that it provided an alternative to RHEL because it was a clone of it, ready to be used in the production environment. If you want to know more about the relationship between CentOS and RHEL, I have an article talking about that here.
Many organizations that have no resources to afford enterprise support like the one from RedHat, had CentOS as their choice, and even though it is free the CentOS community was very engaged to provide bug fixes and other responses needed and these organizations were left in complete chaos with those changes made by RedHat.
The Perfect Answer
The answer came quickly, and immediately the community found a way to overcome the situation, some solutions come out, one of them was from CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer who started another Linux distribution called Rocky Linux. In memory of his partner Rocky McGaugh in the CentOS project (read more).
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (The company created by Gregory Kurtzer which owns Rocky Linux) defines its product as:
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.
In practice, it works just like CentOS before, with no difference in utilization perspective, and now with a stable version released, it has been the choice of multiples organization to set up an enterprise operating system for free and also the solution for migrating from CentOS.
Rocky Linux’s main site has more information on how to download, install or migrate to Rocky Linux and provides as well good documentation and a big community to help you, find more by clicking here.
My Thoughts
Since the release of the stable version (8.4), I have been working with it and running many software solutions like databases, web servers, and many others, over Rocky Linux and it stands reliable. Switching to Rocky Linux is no brainer.
