Rocky Linux, the open-source enterprise operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has released its latest version, 9.3, on November 15, 2023.

Rocky Linux aims to provide a stable and secure platform for users who want to migrate from CentOS or other RHEL-based distributions. Rocky Linux 9 will be supported through May 2032, with general support until May 2027 and security support through May 2032

Some of the new features and improvements in Rocky Linux 9.3 include:

• Support for PowerPC64le architecture: Images for PowerPC64le systems are now available, expanding Rocky Linux’s reach to a wider range of hardware platforms.
• Updated system toolchain: The system toolchain has been updated to the latest version, providing improved performance and stability.
• Updated performance tools and debuggers: Several performance tools and debuggers have been updated to provide better insights into system performance and identify potential issues.
• Updated compiler toolsets: The compiler toolsets have been updated to support the latest programming languages and development tools.
• Security enhancements: Several security vulnerabilities have been addressed in this release, ensuring that your systems remain protected from the latest threats.
• Updated versions of popular packages such as Redis 7, NodeJS 20, and Apache 2.4.57
• Enhanced security features such as OpenSCAP 1.3.8, SCAP 0.1.69, SEtools 4.4.2
• Introduction of further improvements to support the Extended Master Secret (EMS) extension (RFC 7627) required by the FIPS-140-3 standard for all TLS 1.2 connections.

Breaking Changes

• Azure images for Rocky Linux 9.3 will be published under a new publisher name: resf, instead of the previous long, unreadable name. These images are not published yet, but should be available by the end of the week and will be accompanied by another news post.
• The optional guest-agents group, previously available within both the Minimal Install and Custom Operating System base environments in anaconda, is no-longer available for selection as additional software for those environments. Consult release notes for more details.
• The KDE live image for Rocky Linux 9.3 had problems during the testing phase. For this, we will be providing the older 9.2 images until we can build and provide a working image.

How to upgrade to Rocky Linux 9.3

Current users of Rocky Linux 9 can upgrade to 9.3 from the terminal via dnf update, or from the desktop with GNOME Software, KDE Discover, etc.

CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

By limiting the RHEL public sources to CentOS Stream, it will now be more difficult for community/off-shoot enterprise Linux distributions like Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, Amazon Linux, etc, to provide 1:1 binary compatible builds against given RHEL releases.

If you’ve been following the way Red Hat has been moving CentOS from being a downstream distro to RHEL to making it the upstream community distro with the start of CentOS Stream, you’d know the major shift in Red Hat’s strategy to cater more to the paying customers and partners and killing the spirit of continuing to remain a community enterprise operating system.

“As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.” said Mike McGrath, Red Hat VP of Core Platforms.

We’ll now have to wait and watch the path that will be taken by AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, the 2 most popular community RHEL distros that were started since the time CentOS was moved upstream.

Both Rocky Linux as well as AlmaLinux have tweeted asking their community to not panic and a solution will soon be found.

With the recent GA announcements of RedHat 8.8 as well as its upstream alternatives Rocky Linux 8.8 and AlmaLinux 8.8 one can now finally update Linux offline!

With this enhancement, you can apply offline updates to RHEL by using the new yum offline-upgrade command.

There are times when you have too many services running on the system and many services that need stopping or restarting post the updates do not stop or restart within the timeout defined for the yum upgrade packages, which causes the yum upgrade command to fail.

The one easy solution for this is to reboot into the minimal mode, where only the most necessary services needed for Linux to run, will be running. This solution has been put to practice for the command yum offline-upgrade.

To fix this issue, you can simply run yum offline-upgrade download. On running this, yum will download all the package updates onto the system the usual way. Then you need to run yum offline-upgrade reboot. The system will now reboot into a minimal mode, install the updated packages that were downloaded earlier and then reboot back into the normal mode.

CentOS Stream is as popular a laptop/desktop Operating System as much as it is a Server based one. And when it comes to working on your personal machine, you’d always love to work on a GUI instead of on terminal. CentOS Stream itself comes with multiple GUIs including KDE & GNOME.

In this article, lets learn how to setup KDE also known as K Desktop Environment on CentOS Stream.

First, update your system to have all the latest packages, so we don’t have any conflicts come up…

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh -y

Next, if not already done, install the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository which provides a set of additional packages for CentOS Stream

sudo dnf install \
    https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm \
    https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-next-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm

Now go ahead and install the latest version of KDE, which is KDE Plasma at the time we are writing this post and reboot your machine

sudo dnf groupinstall "KDE Plasma Workspaces" -y
sudo reboot

Once you restart your machine, you’ll return to the login screen. Here in the bottom right corner, you’ll be able to choose the desktop environment you’d login to. Now go ahead and login and start using the new KDE desktop environment and share your comments!

To start with RedHat is most known for its association with RedHat Enterprise Linux and is the primary sponsor of Fedora Project and CentOS Stream along with many other open source projects. Redhat Inc. was acquired by IBM in 2019 and is now operated as an independent subsidiary of IBM.

Why would the same company want to maintain 3 Linux operating systems?

To start with, all the 3 of these Linux distributions use the RPM (Redhat Package Manager) packages. Most of the packages can be used interchangebly amongst these Linux distributions. So in order to understand the basic difference between them, we need to first understand the difference between a community distribution (commonly called as distro) and an enterprise distribution.

Community vs enterprise distro

Linux as we all know is a free and open source operating system. Which means anybody who understands it well enough can develop features into a distro and add it to the repository for it to become a part of the upcoming release. This ensures that you always have the bleeding edge features in community based distro. However, it does come with a drawback, that the new features may not have been tested well, so an updated would be soon on its way. This causes stability issues from an enterprise perspective. Enterprises prefer to have fixed periodic update cycles with a long term support (LTS). This is where comes the enterprise Linux distro. Enterprise Linux distros are tested with wider audience, features are stabilised and only then are added to the final release.

Fedora release cycle

Fedora Linux falls under the category of community Linux distro. They have a release cycle of around 6 months with the support for the current version being valid till a month after the release of the next version.

CentOS Stream release cycle

CentOS release cycle matches with that of Redhat releases. The major version number matches that of the major release of Redhat, while the minor version number being the actual release update. Starting with CentOS Stream, it is now an upstream Linux distro to Redhat.

Redhat release cycle

Redhat is a commercial enterprise linux distro with fixed release and support cycles. Red Hat releases a new point version of a particular series every year and a major version after approximately 5 years. It offers 10-year life cycle support so you can better support long-term apps.

Upstream vs Downstream distro

The development and release cycle of a Linux distro can be compared also whether it is upstream to Redhat or downstream to Redhat.

The bleeding edge upstream is Fedora. Fedora matures into CentOS stream. CentOS Stream is a “continuously delivered distro that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux development, positioned as a midstream between Fedora and Redhat distros. With CentOS only recently moving to upstream releases to Redhat, it will be worth keeping a watch on how often do the releases happen in CentOS Stream.

Since in upstream, CentOS Stream lies between Fedora and Redhat, it is expected to have releases more often than Redhat, however lesser often as compared to Fedora. CentOS Stream 9 releases will give a better picture towards this.

And then there are downstream distros which were launched after Redhat announced the change in the stance of CentOS from the earlier downstream distro to upstream, from its CentOS Stream. These distros are Rocky Linux (by the founder of CentOS Project) and Alma Linux (from the house of CloudLinux). They are also gaining wide spread popularity, as they track close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are as stable as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and are free to use.

You can read more about whether to opt for CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux before making up your mind for your next installation.

Back in 2019, Redhat had announced that they will be changing their sponsorship for CentOS Linux distribution from December 2021. CentOS Stream would be an upstream development platform designed for CentOS community members.

Rocky Linux

Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system led by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project after RedHat decided to switch to CentOS Stream. One reason it is also called the unofficial successor to the CentOS Project.

Rocky Linux continues to keep the original charm of CentOS to be the stable downstream build of Redhat. It is taken as a drop-in replacement of CentOS being a 100% bug-for-bug fork.

What does Rocky Linux mean to the CentOS users?

It means that you can continue to expect the same stable Enterprise Linux build that one would be used to while using CentOS, on Rocky Linux as well, since it continues to be the downstream build of Redhat. It means that Rocky Linux will continue to follow the RedHat release cycle and release after a stable release of Redhat.

AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux, like Rocky Linux, is also a community enterprise operating system led by CloudLinux. CloudLinux has been in the Linux distribution, by the same name, offers a commercial linux distribution targeted towards the web hosting industry.

When Redhat announced the change in the sponsorship of the CentOS Project from being downstream to upstream CentOS Stream project, AlmaLinux was the first one to come up with a replacement for CentOS.

What does AlmaLinux mean to the CentOS users?

AlmaLinux is also a drop-in replacement for CentOS and unlike its parent company’s CloudLinux, it will continue to remain a free and open source Linux distribution.

Final Thoughts

The choice of whether you would go for CentOS Stream or Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux depends on what is your use case?

If you love having bleading edge features of a new enterprise operating system, which still have been tested more than a Fedora Linux and don’t mind getting operating system updates more often. Then CentOS Stream would be a good choice.

If you rather have a stable, well tested operating system with specific timelines of the releases/updates, then Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux should be the way to go.

Amongst Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux, as of today, there truely is hardly any difference, while not ruling out how far they end up differing as the time passes and newer releases of enterprise linux get released.

Both come with the backings of past experience. While Rockly Linux is from the very people who founded and led the CentOS Project, AlmaLinux is from the company who was able to see the features that were missing in the whole of Redhat, Fedora, CentOS environment, specifically from the web hosting industry stand point and actually build them up as part of their CloudLinux commercial offering.