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Whether Rocky Linux publishing can replace CentOS, this article introduces the corresponding analysis and answer in detail, hoping to help more partners who want to solve this problem to find a more simple and feasible way.

Recently, CentO officially announced that CentOS Stream is the future of the CentOS project, and in the coming year, it will gradually shift the focus of development work from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, causing strong dissatisfaction among CentOS users. To this end, Gregory Kurtzer, founder of CentOS, launched a new project aimed at continuing CentOS.

CentOS is considered to be a stable, secure and free server Linux distribution. The stability of the project has been threatened in part because of recent changes to the project by Red Hat, owned by IBM. A brief description is as follows:

The focus has shifted from CentOS Linux (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the rebuilt version of RHEL) to CentOS Stream, while CentOS Stream has been released before the current RHEL version.

As a rebuilt version of RHEL 8, CentOS Linux 8 will die at the end of 2021.

After that, the scrolling version of CentOS Stream becomes the identity of the CentOS project. There will be no RHEL 9 based CentOS 9 in the future.

CentOS Linux 7 will continue its life cycle and end in 2024.

Before introducing CentOS Stream, get a little background about Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora.

It is necessary to explain first. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat that provides both server and desktop versions. They have strict guidelines to protect the Red Hat trademark.

Red Hat has two main community projects on the Linux distribution: Fedora and CentOS.

Fedora has been the upstream of RHEL for many years. This means that new features and changes appear first in Fedora, and some of these features and changes will be added to the next version of RHEL. Generally speaking, Fedora is the equivalent of a testing ground for Red Hat, at least until a few years ago.

CentOS, on the other hand, is a downstream community project. Any changes introduced by RHEL will also be added to CentOS. Released a new version of RHEL? A new version of CentOS will be released in the coming months.

Generally speaking, CentOS is a clone of RHEL, with most of the advantages of RHEL, but not at the cost of RHEL. So far, it has been common for paying customers to get functions in RHEL, and then community users to get them through CentOS.

CentOS Stream: the initial experiment became the future.

In September 2019, Red Hat announced CentOS Stream. It is a rolling release of CentOS.

The idea is to use CentOS Stream as a mid-stream between Fedora upstream development and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) downstream development.

As a result, Fedora has become a testing ground for future major versions of RHEL and CentOS. At the same time, CentOS Stream clears the way to contribute to future minor versions of RHEL and CentOS.

Think that sounds like a good idea? This was true before Red Hat announced that CentOS would only exist in the form of CentOS Stream in the future.

The life of the latest stable version, CentOS 8, is suddenly shortened to the end of 2021 instead of May 2029. The older CentOS 7 will still be supported until 2024.

Do you think there is something wrong with this change? When you deploy CentOS 8, you think you will have a stable production server by 2029. Instead, it will be stopped next year, and you will be forced to choose whether to choose CentOS Stream or replace it with another distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu.

This means that while paid RHEL users will enjoy a fully tested stable server, community members have no choice but to use a less stable rolling distribution.

Corporate intervention often brings bad luck.

As Nixcraft analyses, when a big company makes its debut, it may not always bring good news. Community projects are often hit.

Red Hat has been a successful company for a long time. It is the first open source company with billions of dollars in revenue. Red Hat also specializes in containers and choreography platforms, acting like an industry leader.

The deep-pocketed but struggling IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion. The deal remains one of the biggest technology acquisitions in history.

IBM is directing Red Hat, while Red Hat is directing CentOS. The move to change a stable CentOS to CentOS Stream will discourage people from using the free CentOS server. CentOS is the second most popular choice in the server sector, and some of its users may choose the RHEL license. This will generate additional revenue for Red Hat.

Red Hat wants you to trust the CentOS Stream used for the server

CentOS guarantees that this will not make CentOS Stream a beta test platform for RHEL.

CentOS Stream will get patches and functionality before RHEL. In general, we expect CentOS Stream to have less bug and more runtime functionality than RHEL until those packages reach the RHEL version.

Red Hat also recommends confidence in the CentOS Stream project. It mentions that many enterprises already use CentOS Stream for servers.

We have seen our ecosystem embrace CentOS Stream as a "rolling preview" of RHEL's next batch of features (kernel and functional aspects). Facebook runs millions of servers to support its vast global social network, all of which have migrated (or are in the process of migrating) to their operating systems derived from CentOS Stream.

What kind of future?

It's interesting to predict the future. At present, despite all the guarantees made by Red Hat, CentOS seems to be becoming the beta of future versions of RHEL.

Worst of all, Red Hat and CentOS don't bother to reassure users. At least they could have made these changes with CentOS 9. The sudden termination of CentOS 8 was a bad move. Imagine a system administrator trying to migrate from CentOS 7 to 8, only to find that support for CentOS 8 ends eight years ahead of schedule.

Rocky Linux: a new community enterprise operating system branched from RHEL

Gregory M. Kurtzer, the founder of CentOS Linux, doesn't seem to like Red Hat's official "change of direction" for CentOS Linux.

Of course, given that CentOS Linux will soon become the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, many people will be forced to switch to SUSE or Ubuntu Enterprise, even if they don't like it.

In this case, if all goes well, Rocky Linux may be the perfect replacement for CentOS Linux 7Tap 8 users at the end of support.

So far, we don't have any specific information about Rocky Linux, but you will notice that Gergory himself has created the GitHub page:

Here are the goals set by Kurtzer in terms of Rocky Linux:

Given that CentOS has changed direction, Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed to achieve 100% bug-for-bug compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Because the CentOS community is unhappy and unhappy with Red Hat's decision, Rocky Linux can actually make a difference.

You will find several comments in CentOS's blog post as well as a petition to stop destroying CentOS Linux.

No one wants CentOS to be the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the community is expected to see more news after the news that the creator of CentOS Linux released Rocky Linux.

Let's hope that Rocky Linux will not eventually be acquired by another large organization and fall into the trap of "hugging, expanding, destroying".

This is the answer to the question about whether Rocky Linux can replace CentOS. I hope the above content can be of some help to you. If you still have a lot of doubts to be solved, you can follow the industry information channel to learn more about it.

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