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Rocky Linux 9.0

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Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#121

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

Galanwe wrote: post #88
stonogo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority o…

> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…

> Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff

Heck, that's the very stuff nobody wants to take care of, kudos to him he wanted to spend his time on these.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#122

Post by 2143 »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #11

Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases

> I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers

Could you elaborate?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#123

Post by jillesvangurp »

tokamak wrote: post #101
jillesvangurp wrote: post #98

I find it interesting that there's a need for Rocky to exist at all. IBM basically killed Centos, which was the unofficial Red Hat release that came into existence when Red Hat stopped providing free versions of Red Hat which Red Hat then grand fathered in as a thing they actively supported. That whole process was just weird. I did not encounter a single project that actually used Red Hat after that happened: world +…

RedHat benefit is support. You can sue them if something goes wrong ;) Good engineering is using on local what is used on servers. RHEL definitely is about servers foremost. There are many industries where RHEL is a must. Amazon Linux is derivative of RHEL. Good point about containers.

To me it just looks like they fragmented their own market for no good reason and drove a lot of business to competitors competing with them with their own product. Before Centos, the upsell for Red Hat support was pretty easy: lots of companies were already using it anyway so twisting their arms a little for some support money was probably easy.

Now, not so much. Do they even know who uses Alm or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux? Do these companies share their CRM data with IBM/Red Hat. Probably not. And of course both are in the business of providing support and consultancy themselves. IBM does the hard work and those companies reap the benefits. Very noble but not very smart.

The whole setup is weird. The only reason for these distributions to exist at all is that IBM/Red Hat refuses to distribute their own software directly. They are still doing the work and providing it for free in source code form (not optional) which is why this works at all. But they've created this whole side hustle that is cutting them off from their own user base. How is that in any way a smart business strategy? All they'd have to do to fix it is roll back to just providing Red Hat to people that want it for free and then up-sell them on support contracts. That's business they aren't currently getting.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#124

Post by ploek »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

It's what you get support for. At my job we run several third party applications that are targeted at RHEL/RHEL-clones. Sure, they might run on other distros, but if you need the vendors support, you better be running RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#125

Post by trimir2022 »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

Supercomputing centers and all the servers are prime candidates, where the hardware and software stack never change for the lifetime of the computer (which is around 7-8 years at least).

Do note that what users can use on that, and what system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months. The stability is more for the hardware drivers and things like that, where things are still very iffy because a lot of hardware is actually latest hardware, so not all bugs have been sorted. Infiniband for example is not stable and mainstream at all.

Ubuntu will go through two LTS releases in that time, while you can continue with a single RHEL/CentOS release.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#126

Post by RealStickman_ »

2143 wrote: post #122
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #11

Note that AlmaLinux released 9.0 about 40 days ago. They're also significantly faster with releasing minor updates (including releases like 8.6). On top of that, I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers (regarding community interactions and such stuff). https://lwn.net/Articles/896438/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases

> I like their attitude a lot more compared to what I've seen from Rocky's developers Could you elaborate?

The Alma Linux guys seemed happy to engage with the community, for example by coming on the Linux Unplugged podcast and discussing the (at the time) future governance structure of Alma. Rocky Linux rather agressively declined to come onto that same podcast iirc.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#127

Post by geokon »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

If you want to make a static build with an ancient glib (so it runs everywhere) but you want to use a recent compiler then CentOS is the straightforward option. It provides modern toolchains over an ancient base system

I think this is how you make Appimage files that run on all distros (maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong)

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#128

Post by pt_PT_guy »

I've been happy with Oracle Linux for free at home usage. With a well-established, stable, consistent timed releases. Is there any reason why should I switch to Rocky (or Alma?)

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#129

Post by mrweasel »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

There are entire industries that cannot and will not use rolling releases. That can either be regulatory requirements, or it can be environment where you need/want to be sure that the platform is identical to a reference system.

The best examples are perhaps hospitals, and medical equipment. I previously worked with a hospital where the software is only certified to run on RedHat, and where the system is very tightly controlled. A patch can only be deployed in production, if it has parsed testing and staging environments.

I've also read about research projects, where different versions of glibc, would yield different results. In this case I will continue to argue that this is pretty bad for reproducibility and more of a problem with the people doing the science and not underlying operation system.

Errors, bugs, security holes do sometimes make it into rolling releases, and in some environments regressions are catastrophic or deadly.

Personally I tend opposite world view compared to you. Rolling release are great, for a very small niche, such as desktops for office workers or developers in certain industries.

Rocky Linux is self is a great project, because it allows you to have an environment identical, or close to identical, to the RedHat installations that will eventually run test, staging, QA and production environments, but without the cost. I had been skeptical that Rocky Linux would deliver, but I'm very please and happy that they do.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#130

Post by mm007emko »

silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

I want to tell you that you are incorrect even I upvoted your comment :). There are industries which cannot use rolling distros for whatever reason. I switched jobs at the beginning of this year from a cloud-application development where everything could work on rolling releases and more or less lived on the bleeding edge to developing and provisioning a cloud platform (not everything can work on a public cloud: energy companies, essential telecommunication, many healthcare providers don't want to do that etc). Two worlds so close together physically but totally different philosophies.

We don't use CentOS or Rocky. Our customers pay for RedHat or SLES. But I can see that someone wants RHEL and don't want to pay for the license and don't want to switch to Ubuntu/Debian or OpenSUSE either. I don't understand that, they are not that expensive for what they are but ... I am a software developer by profession, not an accountant. (I even saw industries paying for Windows Servers or HP UX, the prices were pretty eye-watering; the Linux-based options are either cheaper or at the same level as MS Win which for multi-million Euro company is not THAT much and even can pay off when you need to call support.)

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