Been using RL with KDE plasma GUI since the demise of CentOS.
running dnf-automatic from cron every night, systems have been stable for years. bc I was busy starting a new job, I didn't even realize that they all upgraded from 9.4 to 9.5 until two months later.
Firefox, FreeCAD, 3D printing, google chrome/sheets, Visual Studio Code, Plex server, Plex MediaCenter, audacity, ffmpeg.
Stable
If you are looking for an alternative to Windows that doesn't require constant fiddling and just works as an operating system, I couldn't recommend it more.
I even have a system 3000 miles away with people who know nothing about windows or mac let alone Linux, and it just works.
Version: 9.5 Rating: 10 Date: 2025-01-04 Votes: 1
I know this is meant as a server OS, but I use this as my everyday distro, it’s that stable. It’s kinda boring that I haven’t had any breakages or lockups using this for the past 6 months- but that’s a good thing, because it works and you don’t have to go through so much hassle and stress- that’s a plus. From visiting the forum, there are a lot of friendly, helpful people there- that’s another plus. Ram usage is normal and not too high, applications are quick to open and turning on the computer, it is pretty quick to get to the desktop, and the shutdown is pretty quick too.
Rocky is definitely a great distro to use, not just for server use, but as an everyday OS.
The only minus about it is, the insistence of this and other server distros to always have gnome as the default desktop environment- which is bad because the gnome developers make it so hard to change things to your liking and they make sure any workarounds become broken and mess up the distro- that is not at all a fault of Rocky Linux, but of the gnome developers. If you’re coming from Windows Server, gnome is definitely not the way to go about getting people use to their new home- KDE is lighter in resources, is more user-friendly (especially coming from Windows Server) and the developers listen to users’ feedback and are transparent and open, compared to gnome’s developers who are rude, standoffish and act like Microsoft making sure if you do any workarounds, they’ll sniff it out and make sure you can’t use the workarounds, and if you do, the updates will break your system and lead to hours of frustration- again, that’s the fault of the gnome developers, and not Rocky Linux.
Really like this distro. I have been using it on my workstation for about a month and a half and have very little issues with it. It is incredibly snappy, and getting things to install is not too complicated. I have asked the rocky forum from time to time on help of getting certain things installed but this is not rocky's fault, just the rhel nature so this would translate over to any of the other rhel distros (alma, oracle etc). Nvidia drivers do not install by default so it does require some investigating but it was well documented. This distro is my main everyday OS and I really love it.
I've been using Rocky Linux for about two years to manage various services like Apache, Samba, and mail server configurations. Recently, I decided to set up an OpenVPN server. It's been over two weeks since I configured the OpenVPN server (version 2.4.12) with EasyRSA on Rocky Linux 8.10 (minimal). The installation process for both the system (Anaconda makes it a breeze) and the OpenVPN server was remarkably straightforward and user-friendly. The performance has been reliable, and the setup was smooth, reaffirming my confidence in Rocky Linux for handling diverse server tasks. Both server-to-client and client-to-client connections are working perfectly,
Great distro. Speedy, not too heavy on system resources- I don't like gnome so I install another desktop environment like KDE and wipe anything to do with gnome out of the system, and it performs a lot better, plus KDE is lighter in resources than gnome and has tons of customization. KDE is also good towards its users and listens to their feedback and actively participates in the community, and with gnome, it's a dark, hostile, bleak environment. With Rocky Linux, I was worried with the whole change in CentOS and feared that would happenm one day, so I'm happy to of found Rocky, it's lead by the developer of CentOS before he was pushed out in favor of one of Red Hat's hardliners, so it's comfortable knowing the developer of CentOS is continung on and will get the respect he deserves. Rocky is also a non-profit organization, so that's even more community friendly and helpful, The developers engage with the community and are friendly, helpful and listen to the community's feedback and aren't hostile to that, the community is great as well and helpful. When I was trying the gnome desktop, I had some crashes and free-ups, but that's the fault of the gnome developers and not Rocky's. I do wish Rocky would switch to using KDE as the default desktop, it's so much easier to use and user friendly and doesn't have all of the dependency errors and deep lock-in that gnome forces on its users. Overall, I think this is a great distro, I do recommend Rocky Linux.
Version: 9.4 Rating: 9 Date: 2024-06-08 Votes: 15
Great distro..I am very impressed. Great polish and attention to detail makes this a great distro for Enterprise and workstation alike. I downloaded and installed the live Cinemon version. A very snappy desktop. Great work team.
The only critisism is that I wished a software store was included by default. I installed gnome-software and installed a more modern kernel to enable more modern hardware. and now have a great experience. Once I have finished installing all my needed software for what I want to do then all will be well.
This distro is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, basically. It is loaded with professionalism and polish. Be sure to go into the Software utility and hit the drop down menu for adding needed repositories.
I am using the default Gnome DE, tweaked with the "Tweak" tool in Apps, and tweaked more with Gnome Extensions (including my favorite, very robust "Just Perfection" extension).
You can do anything you want to do with this, and it is a very pleasant experience right from the beginning. I used to have a negative attitude toward Gnome, but that has changed now (this shipped with version 40).
Rocky installs just like Fedora and Red Hat, using the Anaconda installer which presents you right away with the whole page of choices. I always start with the Network program, then on to Time and Date, then the installation destination area I want the distro on. After that you can decide which Rocky Linux environment you want, "Work Station," "Development," "Server," etc.
Rocky Anaconda moved a lot of info and apps etc quickly and was ready to go with both User and Root accounts I'd set up in about six minutes.
It rebooted into a default Gnome desktop and was ready for my customisations. Everything is working as expected and is FAST and glitch-free.
An easy "10."
Version: 9.4 Rating: 5 Date: 2024-06-03 Votes: 0
It is a stable but very little evolved OS, based on a Linux 5.14 kernel which does not take into account recent hardware. This OS relies solely on stability and guarantees no crashes for production applications.
This is not an OS oriented for the general public. The environment remains prehistoric and very limited (GNOME and XFCE mainly). In some cases, the KDE environment does not install. The OS has too much obsolescence in its libraries to the point that KDE crashes or simply does not start. The performance of graphics cards and recent hardware is not taken into account. You have to rely on proprietary drivers to try to make everything work.
In short, it is a troubleshooting solution for the general public.
Version: 9.3 Rating: 9 Date: 2024-02-10 Votes: 20
I would like to see postfix package updated to 4.x. Rocky Linux works very well on Apple Intel hardware (note eufi partition needs to be vfat). Rocky Linux has very flexible install options using anaconda kick start configuration file. The in place update from 8.8 to 9.x has been largely successful in most cases, no real issues. We have been using Rocky Linux since September in various work loads, servers, build machines, desktop GUI workstations. All have been a success. Hats off to the Rocky Linux folks.
that's ideal for servers.
is especially suitable for users needing an alternative to CentOS or RHEL. I have already moved all the servers on rocky linux
everything runs in a very solid manner.
has good performance in various fields.
GUI – Rocky Linux has a great user interface
As a community-based distro, it won't be subject to the whims of a commercial company and If you want a free enterprise linux, I’d recommend Rocky.
Not much to say other than - Everything works great.
Version: 9.2 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-06-20 Votes: 22
Our company have many CentOS 7.9 machines and we started to migrate to Rocky 8-9 last year.
So far so good, very smooth when running on GPU hosts. We also updated our web servers and database servers with ease.
Rocky Linux is easy to install, coming from a RHEL/CentOS background. Setting up nfs, iscsi shares and migrating our authentication through Windows AD found it surprisingly easy. A good choice to upgrade from CentOS. But time will tell if it becomes as popular as CentOS. So well done to Rocky Linux developers and thank you.
Version: 9.2 Rating: 8 Date: 2023-05-27 Votes: 14
Much better than Oracle Linux.
Installer actually works, doesn't supper from any broken repo issues during setup and doesn't freeze/lock up like in Oracle Linux installer does.
Is actually stable unlike Oracle Linux.
Definitely higher on the performance scale than Oracle Linux fro what I have observed on my hardware at least.
Appears to have more frequent release cycles. Keep it up guys!
Has a cool logo unlike Oracle Linux :D
Overall it just feels like a much better executed project in comparison.
I would trust this to run on my servers long term instead of Oracle Linux.
Did I mention Oracle Linux is not that good?
Overall it's shaping up to be the real successor to CentOS. Everything is headed in the right direction.
After some successful tests we migrated all our servers from CentOS to Rocky in the last 12 months. In the meantime, over 100 servers are running Rocky here to our complete satisfaction. No issues, no crashes, all in all a perfect replacement for CentOS.
We don't have any desktop applications on our machines so i can't comment on that, but as a server operating system i can recommend Rocky without reservation.
In short: we had imagined the replacement of CentOS to be much worse. Well done Rocky.
Version: 9.1 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-03-04 Votes: 7
a beast of a desktop
blazing fast
nice integration with nvidia
nice flatpak integration for apps -
looks very nice with zorin theme, menta icons
secure with RHEL tools (firewalld, etc...)
average reboot ~1/month (much better than arch / etc... in my usecase, as i reboot with new kernel updates).
has never crashed
does use some memory, but what the heck...
running on all 3 of my 'z' workstations without a hitch, including an old z620 (wanted to use debian for that system, but interestingly could not configure booting from default drive => nvme (cannot boot nvme directly)).
Version: 9.1 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-03-03 Votes: 4
a beast of a desktop
blazing fast
nice integration with nvidia
nice flatpak integration for apps -
looks very nice with zorin theme, menta icons
secure with RHEL tools (firewalld, etc...)
average reboot ~1/month (much better than arch / etc... in my usecase, as i reboot with new kernel updates).
has never crashed
does use some memory, but what the heck...
running on all 3 of my 'z' workstations without a hitch, including an old z620 (wanted to use debian for that system, but interestingly could not configure booting from default drive => nvme (cannot boot nvme directly)).
It is a very stable distro, I am using Rocky Linux 9.1 as my daily driver. It can be used as a desktop or workstation distro, especially if you prefer stability over new features. For desktop software like google chrome or others like telegram etc. use flathub.com and rpmfusion repositories for a delightful stable experience.
It does not include support for btrfs, but ext4 and xfs can be used easily. ntfs can be accessed using ntfs3g (sudo yum install ntfs3g). Nvidia driver (sudo yum install kmod-nvidia) works like charm after installing rpmfusion repo.
If you are fed up with distro hopping and seeking a overall a good stable distro, this is it!
Version: 8.7 Rating: 10 Date: 2023-01-24 Votes: 6
We migrated everything over from CentOS to Rocky, and everything worked perfectly. Very smooth and easy migration; no complaints at all with the process and results. The community is extremely helpful and engaged if you have any questions. We also found that Rocky had much less resource consumption and was faster than CentOS, which was a great bonus. In short, if you used CentOS and now need a new open source and commercially supported enterprise operating system, Rocky is the way to go. And finally, while it also isn't done yet (as of the time of this review), having FIPS 140-3 certification on open source Rocky Linux will be near game changing for us when that launches.
In short: we are extremely satisfied with Rocky Linux filling the void CentOS left; headache and worry free.
Version: 9.1 Rating: 6 Date: 2022-12-25 Votes: 0
I really like the distro but In my case, this distro have a problem with the fonts, these are rectangular and intelligible, as a workstation its pretty smooth and feels great, not like fedora that after 37 stops working well in my pc, i am not a server user but i was interested in a fedora alternative with dnf package manager. - -
A pretty great free community-based server Linux distro is what Rocky Linux is about.
I’m happy to of switched over from CentOS when their fiasco happened and it all came crashing down. I used CentOS as a secondary server distro, and with my curiosity, I compared CentOS and Rocky Linux side by side, and unsurprisingly- Rocky Linux was much faster, stable and easier to use with less downtime and crashes. It has plain gnome, but it gets the job done, I myself would prefer MATE instead of Gnome to be used, but that’s just my preference.
In the forums, the community and developers I see are very helpful and pretty responsive to people’s questions, help and if they have encountered any bugs.
Overall, I see this as a great server distro, and after seeing its easier to use then CentOS, I wiped CentOS off of the secondary server computer and put Rocky Linux on it.
Keep up the great job developers and the community here too!
Rocky Linux is the best CentOS replacement. For me is a very good distro and I have already moved all the servers to it. Migrating over from CentOS with Rocky’s provided transfer tool worked perfectly. Resource consumption is much less than CentOS was too. Stability is rock solid. It’s easy to use and update also. Applications are very responsive and Rocky has overall been a joy to use and perfect community supported enterprise distro.
Everything works well and I will recommend Rocky Linux.
Good job guys and thank you!
Version: 9.0 Rating: 1 Date: 2022-10-27 Votes: 0
I started "linuxing" when Red Hat and Mandrake were top preferences for new users... and now, 23yrs later, tried to install Rocky and failed... I don't work on computers, just use them, maybe this is a distro just for experts (but for experts... any distro is good)...
Lots of problems...1st PC must be recent (which is untypical for Linux), after that, problems with root password, need to login twice (on first try it says always 'incorrect password'), after that got "unable to connect to servers" when tried to update... this kind of problems (right in distros "heart") are a "red flag"... that's like a "seed" that will give a lot of "flowers" (problems) in future... I am done...
Going to try Alma...
Nowadays we have a lot of "good looking" distros that are BS... "on the paper" everything looks awesome, but when you try it... it doesn't work decently...
PS - If you are searching for a distro to try Linux for the first time... go for Ubuntu or Mint... and after that... you will never leave them... I am trying to... but it looks I will never leave Mint Xfce and Kubuntu...
Version: 9.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-10-08 Votes: 3
Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. I was a Centos user before Redhat decided to take it over and corrupt it, but Rocky picked up the baton and ran with it so I followed suit. This has been pretty stable and easy-to-use for me. I transferred over from CentOS to Rocky and everything has been transferred and is working well, even less resource usage than CentOS. The tool included to switch from CentOS to here works perfectly, everything was transferred over and I’m up and running and for the resource usage, it’s running even better than CentOS has.
I recommend Rocky Linux.
Version: 9.0 Rating: 1 Date: 2022-09-15 Votes: 0
Not impressed, still get mcelog errors on AMD processors which have been occurring since 2014ish. It’s funny searching the official redhat bug sites that their recommendation is to just ignore the error that it does not work on AMD, another redhatter suggested this was a cosmetic error and no correction needed. Someone else suggested mcelog was deprecated and to use rasdaemon instead, if it is deprecated why are you still shipping it in ver 9? So they have been kicking the can down the road for 9 years and nobody has bothered to look at it. It does work on SUSE/openSUSE who have their own patched ver and are much better at fixing bugs than closing them out hoping they will fix themselves like they do at redhat. So I guess the advantage of going with Rocky is that you get free bugs for free that redhat doesn’t know how to fix and cheaper than paying the $179 redhat is asking.
Version: 9.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-09-07 Votes: 4
We needed to update our whole company's workstation (~300) and server (~80) fleet away from CentOS after CentOS 8 died. I took the opportunity to upgrade the workstations to 9, and just did an 8 to 8 migration on the servers. The server migration was incredibly easy, the "migrate2rocky" script did everything without error. The workstation migration was more effort, but that was expected as it was a new version and I needed to make new kickstarts. Everything is working flawlessly. I can't say much more than that, it just works.
Version: 9.0 Rating: 1 Date: 2022-09-04 Votes: 0
Does not work with latest UEFI motherboard. It lists just a few lines and crashes after "cancel waiting for multi path siblings". This is an old Redhat error and while that might be an accurate clone of Redhat it is absolutely worthless for new up to date hardware. I have loaded Anaconda and that works and I've loaded the old CentOS 7 and that works so I know my hardware is OK. Yes that's right the old CentOS 7 works BUT Rocky Linux 9 does NOT. So what is the problem? This is a degradation of Linux not an improvement.
Version: 8.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-08-28 Votes: 4
Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. We were able to migrate all of our existing CentOS machines to Rocky using their the script. It worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend Rocky Linux for anyone looking for a direct clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. We were able to migrate all of our existing CentOS machines to Rocky using their the script. It worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend Rocky Linux for anyone looking for a direct clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Version: 9.0 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-08-09 Votes: 0
Rocky has become my go-to for server related OS installs. I waited on going to any EL8 distro when the news came out about CentOS and I stuck around on Scientific Linux 7 (for which I still have such love for) but I've been very impressed with how solid and stable Rocky 9 has been. When I've had issues their community was quick to help and very friendly. Running Rocky 9 now on everything from big servers in the server room to my home lab of Intel NUCs and Raspberry Pi's.
Keep up the great work Rocky!
Version: 8.6 Rating: 10 Date: 2022-06-09 Votes: 1
Rocky has been a great distro and works well for me. We upgraded from CentOS when that basically as I can say anti-user policies came into place to make the distro a testing ground for Red Hat and not an independent community supported enterprise distro anymore. Anyway, the transfer tool worked well, the OS has been very stable and I’ve experienced no crashes and no lock-ups. It runs better and faster than CentOS did. If you want a free community-based enterprise distro, I’d recommend Rocky. The forum members have been helpful I can see and if I run into any troubles, I know that I have a lot of other people who care about this project and will keep it going well.
I was a Centos user before Redhat decided to take it over and corrupt it, but Rocky picked up the baton and ran with it so I followed suit.
Very good O.S. when used with KDE Plasma desktop, loving every day with Linux.
The only downside is that dreaded Locker which went south after the latest Rocky (RHEL) update went from 8.5 to 8.6, I had to disable it. I really like using some sort of screen saver, but that has been removed now.
Windows programs that I really need to use run fine in a virtual machine, so no need for Windows.
Best April Fools day ever?!? NO. That's just evil. ;) I wish there was an easier way to the Mate desktop, but works great through the suggested route if you're willing to do some mucking around. I formerly used Fedora on my daily driver (a laptop which, admittedly, is getting a little long in the tooth). I'm now re-experiencing some of the stability I enjoyed before Fedora moved past my hardware's sweet spot. I appreciate the opportunity to continue using a community supported version of the up-stream provider's product. Thanks for all you guys do toward that end.
Since last year when Rocky Linux was released, I have successfully migrated about fourty servers to it. The first machines were installed from scratch and the applications were moved.
Eventually I got aware of the Rocky Linux migration script, which supports migrating away from CentOS. Initially pessimistic about such scripts in general (most fail on edge-cases), I was surprised how well it is working. Nice! Thanks for this effort to the Rocky Linux developers for this great job! You made my life a lot easier!
For about four weeks the entire infrastructure that ran CentOS before is on Rocky Linux. Even some of the more difficult CentOS 7 machines were -successfully without exception- migrated to Rocky 8.5 (for this major version migration there are many descriptions on the web to provide additional guidance).
Among other applications, I run Apache, NginX, Pacemaker/Corosync, keepalived, LVS, FreeIPA idM, MariaDB, Icinga, Moodle, KVM and SOLR.
I do not a single crash to report: everything runs in a very solid manner.
Rocky Linux is a server distribution, so I personally do not care much for GUIs. On a few machines that I installed with a GUI, the shipped GNOME version runs nicely though.
Best,
Dr. Raimund Eimann
Version: 8.5 Rating: 9 Date: 2022-03-19 Votes: 9
Installation on MacBook was somehow tricky. I mean partitioning issue as package mactel-boot is also missing
and also GRUB installation issues. That's an odd problem with RHEL, Fedora and so on. There is descriptions of the workaround at Red Hat bugzilla (thanks Matt!).
Beside that, once the installation completed, Rocky Linux has been working great even with some extra repos. If in need of stable distro, good for productivity, give it a try. My rating is 9 out of 10. Would be 10 out of 10 if my Intel Mac was supported.
We have already moved a few servers to it.
Given the results, we decided to move all of them.
We are a big organization, although I cannot mention the name.
At first, the script to migrate worked flawlessly, both from Centos and from Almalinux.
Recently we have experienced problems migrating some machines.
It seems to depend on the fact that Centos Stream is version 8.6 while Centos and Rocky are at version 8.5.
Although we were running Centos stable, to solve those problems we had to move from Centos to Centos Stream, and then to Rocky Linux.
Besides that, I cannot spot any other downsides to moving to Rocky Linux.
Almalinux was our first choice, because it came first, but the big companies supporting Rocky Linux, and its founder being one of the founders of Centos, convinced us to switch from Almalinux to Rocky Linux.
Anyway, I guess that the guys at Almalinux, which I thank you very much for their work, will be very happy even if everybody will use Rocky Linux, given that their goal seems to be altruistic.
Meaning that their goal seems to have a good, or even better, replacement for the disappearing Centos.
Painless transfer over from CentOS. Stability is great. I use LibreOffice and Firefox a lot and I would love if the versions of these programs were updated to newer ones more often. Gnome here is an ok choice for a desktop environment, but not what I’d prefer. Overall though, this distro has been great and I can continue using a community supported enterprise grade distro.
Rocky Linux has been working great for me. Migrating over from CentOS with Rocky’s provided transfer tool worked perfectly. Resource consumption is much less than CentOS was too. Stability is rock solid. It’s easy to use and update also. Thanks developers.
This has been pretty stable and easy-to-use for me. I transferred over from CentOS to Rocky and everything has been transferred and is working well, even less resource usage than CentOS. Applications have responded quickly and if I had any questions, I could ask the community who are helpful and friendly. I’m happy I don’t have to panic anymore when I was using CentOS when I found out they were cutting short support because Rocky Linux was there to make the transfer easy and smooth.
Rock solid-stable, easy-to-use, transfer tool from CentOS works flawlessly and transferred everything over to Rocky. For the only negative, I disagree with using gnome as a desktop environment, I’d prefer KDE instead because gnome is a heavyweight desktop environment and is user unfriendly. The original creator of CentOS (not the new puppet Red Hat put in) started this project and listens to the users and is pretty active & the community is helpful and friendly too, you don’t get that with CentOS at all. Applications are very responsive and Rocky has overall been a joy to use.
Works great, is stable, speedy and works out of the box. The tool to switch over from CentOS to Rocky works great and transferred all of my data over. Perfect community supported enterprise distro.
Rocky Linux is everything that CentOS should’ve been. The founder of CentOS before he was thrown out by Red Hat created this distro and knows what he’s doing to create a community based enterprise distro. Rocky Linux is rock solid, soeedy, easy to use and the community is great and helpful. The tool included to switch from CentOS to here works perfectly, everything was transferred over and I’m up and running and for the resource usage, it’s running even better than CentOS has.
I recommend Rocky Linux.
The "next Centos" distro. Installed on vm, works fine.
(Hyperv 2016, Gen2 VM, UEFI boot, Secure boot off, default partitioning)
Tested functions:
-Virtual Fibre channel (on Hyperv) ok
-Multipathd ok
Next thing will be migrating existing Centos and Oracle linux instances to Rocky.
A great successor to CentOS with a welcoming community and clairvoyant organizational structure. I used the supplied migration script to move over my existing CentOS systems.
Tested 8.3-rc1 and 8.4-rc1 without issue. Fresh installs on VMware. Tested a conversion from CentOS to 8.4-rc1 and have not experienced any negative impact to the system running a test instance of Apache. Looking forward to production.
The system crashed upon completing setup. On another system, I was experiencing kernel panics. Successor to CentOS? I think not. I migrated to SUSE Enterprise Linux and openSUSE Linux respectfully. Everything I did on CentOS I do now on SUSE.
I downloaded boot iso. I managed to install and configure postfix, dovecot, Postfixadmin, Apache, PHP, MariaDB, Roundcube, Clamav, Amavis and everything goes well.
I'm not an expert in Linux, but I installed it with curiosity.
I downloaded the minimal iso file, and I managed to install GNOME on it using RHEL and CentOS tutorial...
This Linux distro will be the choice for people who want a solid server and are used to CentOS.
.
d24
Been using RL with KDE plasma GUI since the demise of CentOS.
running dnf-automatic from cron every night, systems have been stable for years. bc I was busy starting a new job, I didn't even realize that they all upgraded from 9.4 to 9.5 until two months later.
Firefox, FreeCAD, 3D printing, google chrome/sheets, Visual Studio Code, Plex server, Plex MediaCenter, audacity, ffmpeg.
Stable
If you are looking for an alternative to Windows that doesn't require constant fiddling and just works as an operating system, I couldn't recommend it more.
I even have a system 3000 miles away with people who know nothing about windows or mac let alone Linux, and it just works.
I know this is meant as a server OS, but I use this as my everyday distro, it’s that stable. It’s kinda boring that I haven’t had any breakages or lockups using this for the past 6 months- but that’s a good thing, because it works and you don’t have to go through so much hassle and stress- that’s a plus. From visiting the forum, there are a lot of friendly, helpful people there- that’s another plus. Ram usage is normal and not too high, applications are quick to open and turning on the computer, it is pretty quick to get to the desktop, and the shutdown is pretty quick too.
Rocky is definitely a great distro to use, not just for server use, but as an everyday OS.
The only minus about it is, the insistence of this and other server distros to always have gnome as the default desktop environment- which is bad because the gnome developers make it so hard to change things to your liking and they make sure any workarounds become broken and mess up the distro- that is not at all a fault of Rocky Linux, but of the gnome developers. If you’re coming from Windows Server, gnome is definitely not the way to go about getting people use to their new home- KDE is lighter in resources, is more user-friendly (especially coming from Windows Server) and the developers listen to users’ feedback and are transparent and open, compared to gnome’s developers who are rude, standoffish and act like Microsoft making sure if you do any workarounds, they’ll sniff it out and make sure you can’t use the workarounds, and if you do, the updates will break your system and lead to hours of frustration- again, that’s the fault of the gnome developers, and not Rocky Linux.
Really like this distro. I have been using it on my workstation for about a month and a half and have very little issues with it. It is incredibly snappy, and getting things to install is not too complicated. I have asked the rocky forum from time to time on help of getting certain things installed but this is not rocky's fault, just the rhel nature so this would translate over to any of the other rhel distros (alma, oracle etc). Nvidia drivers do not install by default so it does require some investigating but it was well documented. This distro is my main everyday OS and I really love it.
I've been using Rocky Linux for about two years to manage various services like Apache, Samba, and mail server configurations. Recently, I decided to set up an OpenVPN server. It's been over two weeks since I configured the OpenVPN server (version 2.4.12) with EasyRSA on Rocky Linux 8.10 (minimal). The installation process for both the system (Anaconda makes it a breeze) and the OpenVPN server was remarkably straightforward and user-friendly. The performance has been reliable, and the setup was smooth, reaffirming my confidence in Rocky Linux for handling diverse server tasks. Both server-to-client and client-to-client connections are working perfectly,
Great distro. Speedy, not too heavy on system resources- I don't like gnome so I install another desktop environment like KDE and wipe anything to do with gnome out of the system, and it performs a lot better, plus KDE is lighter in resources than gnome and has tons of customization. KDE is also good towards its users and listens to their feedback and actively participates in the community, and with gnome, it's a dark, hostile, bleak environment. With Rocky Linux, I was worried with the whole change in CentOS and feared that would happenm one day, so I'm happy to of found Rocky, it's lead by the developer of CentOS before he was pushed out in favor of one of Red Hat's hardliners, so it's comfortable knowing the developer of CentOS is continung on and will get the respect he deserves. Rocky is also a non-profit organization, so that's even more community friendly and helpful, The developers engage with the community and are friendly, helpful and listen to the community's feedback and aren't hostile to that, the community is great as well and helpful. When I was trying the gnome desktop, I had some crashes and free-ups, but that's the fault of the gnome developers and not Rocky's. I do wish Rocky would switch to using KDE as the default desktop, it's so much easier to use and user friendly and doesn't have all of the dependency errors and deep lock-in that gnome forces on its users. Overall, I think this is a great distro, I do recommend Rocky Linux.
Great distro..I am very impressed. Great polish and attention to detail makes this a great distro for Enterprise and workstation alike. I downloaded and installed the live Cinemon version. A very snappy desktop. Great work team.
The only critisism is that I wished a software store was included by default. I installed gnome-software and installed a more modern kernel to enable more modern hardware. and now have a great experience. Once I have finished installing all my needed software for what I want to do then all will be well.
This distro is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, basically. It is loaded with professionalism and polish. Be sure to go into the Software utility and hit the drop down menu for adding needed repositories.
I am using the default Gnome DE, tweaked with the "Tweak" tool in Apps, and tweaked more with Gnome Extensions (including my favorite, very robust "Just Perfection" extension).
You can do anything you want to do with this, and it is a very pleasant experience right from the beginning. I used to have a negative attitude toward Gnome, but that has changed now (this shipped with version 40).
Rocky installs just like Fedora and Red Hat, using the Anaconda installer which presents you right away with the whole page of choices. I always start with the Network program, then on to Time and Date, then the installation destination area I want the distro on. After that you can decide which Rocky Linux environment you want, "Work Station," "Development," "Server," etc.
Rocky Anaconda moved a lot of info and apps etc quickly and was ready to go with both User and Root accounts I'd set up in about six minutes.
It rebooted into a default Gnome desktop and was ready for my customisations. Everything is working as expected and is FAST and glitch-free.
It is a stable but very little evolved OS, based on a Linux 5.14 kernel which does not take into account recent hardware. This OS relies solely on stability and guarantees no crashes for production applications.
This is not an OS oriented for the general public. The environment remains prehistoric and very limited (GNOME and XFCE mainly). In some cases, the KDE environment does not install. The OS has too much obsolescence in its libraries to the point that KDE crashes or simply does not start. The performance of graphics cards and recent hardware is not taken into account. You have to rely on proprietary drivers to try to make everything work.
In short, it is a troubleshooting solution for the general public.
I would like to see postfix package updated to 4.x. Rocky Linux works very well on Apple Intel hardware (note eufi partition needs to be vfat). Rocky Linux has very flexible install options using anaconda kick start configuration file. The in place update from 8.8 to 9.x has been largely successful in most cases, no real issues. We have been using Rocky Linux since September in various work loads, servers, build machines, desktop GUI workstations. All have been a success. Hats off to the Rocky Linux folks.
that's ideal for servers.
is especially suitable for users needing an alternative to CentOS or RHEL. I have already moved all the servers on rocky linux
everything runs in a very solid manner.
has good performance in various fields.
GUI – Rocky Linux has a great user interface
As a community-based distro, it won't be subject to the whims of a commercial company and If you want a free enterprise linux, I’d recommend Rocky.
Not much to say other than - Everything works great.
Our company have many CentOS 7.9 machines and we started to migrate to Rocky 8-9 last year.
So far so good, very smooth when running on GPU hosts. We also updated our web servers and database servers with ease.
Rocky Linux is easy to install, coming from a RHEL/CentOS background. Setting up nfs, iscsi shares and migrating our authentication through Windows AD found it surprisingly easy. A good choice to upgrade from CentOS. But time will tell if it becomes as popular as CentOS. So well done to Rocky Linux developers and thank you.
Much better than Oracle Linux.
Installer actually works, doesn't supper from any broken repo issues during setup and doesn't freeze/lock up like in Oracle Linux installer does.
Is actually stable unlike Oracle Linux.
Definitely higher on the performance scale than Oracle Linux fro what I have observed on my hardware at least.
Appears to have more frequent release cycles. Keep it up guys!
Has a cool logo unlike Oracle Linux :D
Overall it just feels like a much better executed project in comparison.
I would trust this to run on my servers long term instead of Oracle Linux.
Did I mention Oracle Linux is not that good?
Overall it's shaping up to be the real successor to CentOS. Everything is headed in the right direction.
After some successful tests we migrated all our servers from CentOS to Rocky in the last 12 months. In the meantime, over 100 servers are running Rocky here to our complete satisfaction. No issues, no crashes, all in all a perfect replacement for CentOS.
We don't have any desktop applications on our machines so i can't comment on that, but as a server operating system i can recommend Rocky without reservation.
In short: we had imagined the replacement of CentOS to be much worse. Well done Rocky.
average reboot ~1/month (much better than arch / etc... in my usecase, as i reboot with new kernel updates).
has never crashed
does use some memory, but what the heck...
running on all 3 of my 'z' workstations without a hitch, including an old z620 (wanted to use debian for that system, but interestingly could not configure booting from default drive => nvme (cannot boot nvme directly)).
average reboot ~1/month (much better than arch / etc... in my usecase, as i reboot with new kernel updates).
has never crashed
does use some memory, but what the heck...
running on all 3 of my 'z' workstations without a hitch, including an old z620 (wanted to use debian for that system, but interestingly could not configure booting from default drive => nvme (cannot boot nvme directly)).
It is a very stable distro, I am using Rocky Linux 9.1 as my daily driver. It can be used as a desktop or workstation distro, especially if you prefer stability over new features. For desktop software like google chrome or others like telegram etc. use flathub.com and rpmfusion repositories for a delightful stable experience.
It does not include support for btrfs, but ext4 and xfs can be used easily. ntfs can be accessed using ntfs3g (sudo yum install ntfs3g). Nvidia driver (sudo yum install kmod-nvidia) works like charm after installing rpmfusion repo.
If you are fed up with distro hopping and seeking a overall a good stable distro, this is it!
We migrated everything over from CentOS to Rocky, and everything worked perfectly. Very smooth and easy migration; no complaints at all with the process and results. The community is extremely helpful and engaged if you have any questions. We also found that Rocky had much less resource consumption and was faster than CentOS, which was a great bonus. In short, if you used CentOS and now need a new open source and commercially supported enterprise operating system, Rocky is the way to go. And finally, while it also isn't done yet (as of the time of this review), having FIPS 140-3 certification on open source Rocky Linux will be near game changing for us when that launches.
In short: we are extremely satisfied with Rocky Linux filling the void CentOS left; headache and worry free.
I really like the distro but In my case, this distro have a problem with the fonts, these are rectangular and intelligible, as a workstation its pretty smooth and feels great, not like fedora that after 37 stops working well in my pc, i am not a server user but i was interested in a fedora alternative with dnf package manager. - -
A pretty great free community-based server Linux distro is what Rocky Linux is about.
I’m happy to of switched over from CentOS when their fiasco happened and it all came crashing down. I used CentOS as a secondary server distro, and with my curiosity, I compared CentOS and Rocky Linux side by side, and unsurprisingly- Rocky Linux was much faster, stable and easier to use with less downtime and crashes. It has plain gnome, but it gets the job done, I myself would prefer MATE instead of Gnome to be used, but that’s just my preference.
In the forums, the community and developers I see are very helpful and pretty responsive to people’s questions, help and if they have encountered any bugs.
Overall, I see this as a great server distro, and after seeing its easier to use then CentOS, I wiped CentOS off of the secondary server computer and put Rocky Linux on it.
Keep up the great job developers and the community here too!
Rocky Linux is the best CentOS replacement. For me is a very good distro and I have already moved all the servers to it. Migrating over from CentOS with Rocky’s provided transfer tool worked perfectly. Resource consumption is much less than CentOS was too. Stability is rock solid. It’s easy to use and update also. Applications are very responsive and Rocky has overall been a joy to use and perfect community supported enterprise distro.
Everything works well and I will recommend Rocky Linux.
I started "linuxing" when Red Hat and Mandrake were top preferences for new users... and now, 23yrs later, tried to install Rocky and failed... I don't work on computers, just use them, maybe this is a distro just for experts (but for experts... any distro is good)...
Lots of problems...1st PC must be recent (which is untypical for Linux), after that, problems with root password, need to login twice (on first try it says always 'incorrect password'), after that got "unable to connect to servers" when tried to update... this kind of problems (right in distros "heart") are a "red flag"... that's like a "seed" that will give a lot of "flowers" (problems) in future... I am done...
Going to try Alma...
Nowadays we have a lot of "good looking" distros that are BS... "on the paper" everything looks awesome, but when you try it... it doesn't work decently...
PS - If you are searching for a distro to try Linux for the first time... go for Ubuntu or Mint... and after that... you will never leave them... I am trying to... but it looks I will never leave Mint Xfce and Kubuntu...
Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. I was a Centos user before Redhat decided to take it over and corrupt it, but Rocky picked up the baton and ran with it so I followed suit. This has been pretty stable and easy-to-use for me. I transferred over from CentOS to Rocky and everything has been transferred and is working well, even less resource usage than CentOS. The tool included to switch from CentOS to here works perfectly, everything was transferred over and I’m up and running and for the resource usage, it’s running even better than CentOS has.
I recommend Rocky Linux.
Not impressed, still get mcelog errors on AMD processors which have been occurring since 2014ish. It’s funny searching the official redhat bug sites that their recommendation is to just ignore the error that it does not work on AMD, another redhatter suggested this was a cosmetic error and no correction needed. Someone else suggested mcelog was deprecated and to use rasdaemon instead, if it is deprecated why are you still shipping it in ver 9? So they have been kicking the can down the road for 9 years and nobody has bothered to look at it. It does work on SUSE/openSUSE who have their own patched ver and are much better at fixing bugs than closing them out hoping they will fix themselves like they do at redhat. So I guess the advantage of going with Rocky is that you get free bugs for free that redhat doesn’t know how to fix and cheaper than paying the $179 redhat is asking.
We needed to update our whole company's workstation (~300) and server (~80) fleet away from CentOS after CentOS 8 died. I took the opportunity to upgrade the workstations to 9, and just did an 8 to 8 migration on the servers. The server migration was incredibly easy, the "migrate2rocky" script did everything without error. The workstation migration was more effort, but that was expected as it was a new version and I needed to make new kickstarts. Everything is working flawlessly. I can't say much more than that, it just works.
Does not work with latest UEFI motherboard. It lists just a few lines and crashes after "cancel waiting for multi path siblings". This is an old Redhat error and while that might be an accurate clone of Redhat it is absolutely worthless for new up to date hardware. I have loaded Anaconda and that works and I've loaded the old CentOS 7 and that works so I know my hardware is OK. Yes that's right the old CentOS 7 works BUT Rocky Linux 9 does NOT. So what is the problem? This is a degradation of Linux not an improvement.
Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. We were able to migrate all of our existing CentOS machines to Rocky using their the script. It worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend Rocky Linux for anyone looking for a direct clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Rocky Linux is a perfect CentOS replacement. We were able to migrate all of our existing CentOS machines to Rocky using their the script. It worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend Rocky Linux for anyone looking for a direct clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Rocky has become my go-to for server related OS installs. I waited on going to any EL8 distro when the news came out about CentOS and I stuck around on Scientific Linux 7 (for which I still have such love for) but I've been very impressed with how solid and stable Rocky 9 has been. When I've had issues their community was quick to help and very friendly. Running Rocky 9 now on everything from big servers in the server room to my home lab of Intel NUCs and Raspberry Pi's.
Keep up the great work Rocky!
Rocky has been a great distro and works well for me. We upgraded from CentOS when that basically as I can say anti-user policies came into place to make the distro a testing ground for Red Hat and not an independent community supported enterprise distro anymore. Anyway, the transfer tool worked well, the OS has been very stable and I’ve experienced no crashes and no lock-ups. It runs better and faster than CentOS did. If you want a free community-based enterprise distro, I’d recommend Rocky. The forum members have been helpful I can see and if I run into any troubles, I know that I have a lot of other people who care about this project and will keep it going well.
I was a Centos user before Redhat decided to take it over and corrupt it, but Rocky picked up the baton and ran with it so I followed suit.
Very good O.S. when used with KDE Plasma desktop, loving every day with Linux.
The only downside is that dreaded Locker which went south after the latest Rocky (RHEL) update went from 8.5 to 8.6, I had to disable it. I really like using some sort of screen saver, but that has been removed now.
Windows programs that I really need to use run fine in a virtual machine, so no need for Windows.
Since last year when Rocky Linux was released, I have successfully migrated about fourty servers to it. The first machines were installed from scratch and the applications were moved.
Eventually I got aware of the Rocky Linux migration script, which supports migrating away from CentOS. Initially pessimistic about such scripts in general (most fail on edge-cases), I was surprised how well it is working. Nice! Thanks for this effort to the Rocky Linux developers for this great job! You made my life a lot easier!
For about four weeks the entire infrastructure that ran CentOS before is on Rocky Linux. Even some of the more difficult CentOS 7 machines were -successfully without exception- migrated to Rocky 8.5 (for this major version migration there are many descriptions on the web to provide additional guidance).
Among other applications, I run Apache, NginX, Pacemaker/Corosync, keepalived, LVS, FreeIPA idM, MariaDB, Icinga, Moodle, KVM and SOLR.
I do not a single crash to report: everything runs in a very solid manner.
Rocky Linux is a server distribution, so I personally do not care much for GUIs. On a few machines that I installed with a GUI, the shipped GNOME version runs nicely though.
Best April Fools day ever?!? NO. That's just evil. ;) I wish there was an easier way to the Mate desktop, but works great through the suggested route if you're willing to do some mucking around. I formerly used Fedora on my daily driver (a laptop which, admittedly, is getting a little long in the tooth). I'm now re-experiencing some of the stability I enjoyed before Fedora moved past my hardware's sweet spot. I appreciate the opportunity to continue using a community supported version of the up-stream provider's product. Thanks for all you guys do toward that end.
Installation on MacBook was somehow tricky. I mean partitioning issue as package mactel-boot is also missing
and also GRUB installation issues. That's an odd problem with RHEL, Fedora and so on. There is descriptions of the workaround at Red Hat bugzilla (thanks Matt!).
Beside that, once the installation completed, Rocky Linux has been working great even with some extra repos. If in need of stable distro, good for productivity, give it a try. My rating is 9 out of 10. Would be 10 out of 10 if my Intel Mac was supported.
We have already moved a few servers to it.
Given the results, we decided to move all of them.
We are a big organization, although I cannot mention the name.
At first, the script to migrate worked flawlessly, both from Centos and from Almalinux.
Recently we have experienced problems migrating some machines.
It seems to depend on the fact that Centos Stream is version 8.6 while Centos and Rocky are at version 8.5.
Although we were running Centos stable, to solve those problems we had to move from Centos to Centos Stream, and then to Rocky Linux.
Besides that, I cannot spot any other downsides to moving to Rocky Linux.
Almalinux was our first choice, because it came first, but the big companies supporting Rocky Linux, and its founder being one of the founders of Centos, convinced us to switch from Almalinux to Rocky Linux.
Anyway, I guess that the guys at Almalinux, which I thank you very much for their work, will be very happy even if everybody will use Rocky Linux, given that their goal seems to be altruistic.
Meaning that their goal seems to have a good, or even better, replacement for the disappearing Centos.
Painless transfer over from CentOS. Stability is great. I use LibreOffice and Firefox a lot and I would love if the versions of these programs were updated to newer ones more often. Gnome here is an ok choice for a desktop environment, but not what I’d prefer. Overall though, this distro has been great and I can continue using a community supported enterprise grade distro.
Rocky Linux has been working great for me. Migrating over from CentOS with Rocky’s provided transfer tool worked perfectly. Resource consumption is much less than CentOS was too. Stability is rock solid. It’s easy to use and update also. Thanks developers.
This has been pretty stable and easy-to-use for me. I transferred over from CentOS to Rocky and everything has been transferred and is working well, even less resource usage than CentOS. Applications have responded quickly and if I had any questions, I could ask the community who are helpful and friendly. I’m happy I don’t have to panic anymore when I was using CentOS when I found out they were cutting short support because Rocky Linux was there to make the transfer easy and smooth.
Rock solid-stable, easy-to-use, transfer tool from CentOS works flawlessly and transferred everything over to Rocky. For the only negative, I disagree with using gnome as a desktop environment, I’d prefer KDE instead because gnome is a heavyweight desktop environment and is user unfriendly. The original creator of CentOS (not the new puppet Red Hat put in) started this project and listens to the users and is pretty active & the community is helpful and friendly too, you don’t get that with CentOS at all. Applications are very responsive and Rocky has overall been a joy to use.
Works great, is stable, speedy and works out of the box. The tool to switch over from CentOS to Rocky works great and transferred all of my data over. Perfect community supported enterprise distro.
Rocky Linux is everything that CentOS should’ve been. The founder of CentOS before he was thrown out by Red Hat created this distro and knows what he’s doing to create a community based enterprise distro. Rocky Linux is rock solid, soeedy, easy to use and the community is great and helpful. The tool included to switch from CentOS to here works perfectly, everything was transferred over and I’m up and running and for the resource usage, it’s running even better than CentOS has.
I recommend Rocky Linux.
The "next Centos" distro. Installed on vm, works fine.
(Hyperv 2016, Gen2 VM, UEFI boot, Secure boot off, default partitioning)
Tested functions:
-Virtual Fibre channel (on Hyperv) ok
-Multipathd ok
Next thing will be migrating existing Centos and Oracle linux instances to Rocky.
A great successor to CentOS with a welcoming community and clairvoyant organizational structure. I used the supplied migration script to move over my existing CentOS systems.
Just another red hat rip. Was not impressed. Tried in a VM then tried on bare metal where the installer tanked. Was really hoping for more.
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