Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the largest free software companies. This company offers companies and professionals their own Linux distribution, along with professional support so that customers can solve all kinds of problems by being in contact with professionals instead of having to search the network. Support is, after all, what sets RHEL apart from other Linux distros. In addition to this professional system, Red Hat had another popular distro, CentOS, designed for less demanding users. However, at the end of 2020, Red Hat decided to turn its back on them, something that the community did not like, of course.
The sad story of CentOS
CentOS is, or rather was, a Linux distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux intended for those users who would not, or could not, pay for the RHEL support license. This Linux was maintained by the community, and its stability and performance stood out above all. Its updates were on par with RHEL’s. However, Red Hat decided to hijack the development of this system and turn it into CentOS Stream . As of the end of support for version 8 (something that will happen this year), this distro will become a “testing” version, with a development similar to that of a Rolling Release system. Red Hat will send the test packages to CentOS to test their performance and debug them before moving them to the final version of RHEL. That is, CentOS users will be like guinea pigs for RHEL. And this is something that neither users nor companies can afford.
Luckily, alternatives to replace CentOS have not been slow to appear. And one of the most interesting comes from the hand of the original creator of this distro, Rocky Linux , which releases a new version today.
Rocky Linux 8.4 is ready to replace CentOS
Although RockyLinux is a CentOS fork set to clone Red Hat changes and updates, there has actually been a lot more work behind it. It took 4 months to start up the organization’s infrastructure, and two months to create the operating system from scratch.
Continuing with its evolution, the new version 8.4 of this operating system arrives with some relevant changes. The first one is the kernel, which has been updated to Linux kernel 4.18.0-305 . The GCC 10 toolset has also been included, and many of the packages and services installed by default have been updated, such as:
- Python 3.9
- SWIG 4.0
- Subversion 1.14
- Redis 6
- PostgreSQL 13
- MariaDB 10.5
Rocky Linux 4.8 has also received several security enhancements. For example, the IPSec VPN now supports TCP encapsulation with IKEv2. scap-security has been updated to version 0.1.5.4, and OpenSCAP to 1.3.4. And lastly, the fapolicyd framework now checks the integrity of RPM packages.
Download or migrate to Rocky Linux
This new version of Rocky Linux is now available for all users who want to download and install it on their computers or servers. We can download it for free from the following link . This system is available for AMD64 and ARM64 computers.
Also, if we already have CentOS 8 installed on our computer, or another distro compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL, AlmaLinux or Oracle Linux), we can quickly migrate to Rocky Linux using this simple script . In this way we will avoid becoming the Red Hat guinea pigs and we will continue to have a free, secure and, above all, stable system.
Like Rocky Linux, there are other projects that have decided to clone the RHEL code to continue supporting users, such as AlmaLinux .