Replacing CentOS
Distro Walk – Rocky Linux
© Photo by Peter Pryharski on Unsplash
Rocky Linux steps into the breach left by CentOS with a community-based alternative to RHEL.
Red Hat Linux bought CentOS in 2014, but largely ignored it for years. Essentially, CentOS was the community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), both deriving from Fedora. Then, in December 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS would be discontinued, and it would be replaced by CentOS Stream. Within days, Rocky Linux (Figure 1), named for CentOS cofounder Rocky McGaugh, was announced [1]. Four months later, Rocky Linux released its first version. Like CentOS, it offers a community-based alternative to Red Hat.
Figure 1: Rocky Linux is one of the main CentOS replacements.
Recently, I sent questions about Rocky's current state to Brian Clemens, the project manager at the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF), who got the development team to collaborate on answers. Here's what the RESF development team has to say about Rocky Linux.
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