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Rocky Linux
CentOS’s co-founder has made his own RHELdownstream, and the community is behind him.
A petition to save ‘classic’ CentOS at http:// bit.ly/lxf278-centos-petition seems to have petered out at around 12,000 signatures. But we’ve no doubt that some of our CentOS-using readership will want to resist the pull of the currents and streams Red Hat-ward.
CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer was sufficiently motivated as to start a new project, Rocky Linux, with the aim of providing an enterprise distro positioned downstream from RHEL. The name honours Kurtzer’s fellow co-founder Rocky McGough, sadly now passed. Thinking about it, even if CentOS wasn’t a RedHat trademark, that dedication still makes it a better name than Classic CentOS.
Just after Rocky Linux launched it enjoyed some engagement-metric glory by way of being the top trending repository (for a time) on GitHub. At the time of writing a not-inconsiderable 350 people (all potential contributors) have forked the main distro repository, but more importantly a Release Candidate for Rocky Linux 8.3 has been available since May 1. Before anyone gets too excited, let’s just quote the official FAQ before going any further: “Under no circumstance should you use a release candidate in a production environment. A release candidate is provided for testing and validation purposes only”. Okay. Good.