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What is Rocky Linux?
Rocky Linux is a free and open source operating system meant to be bug-for-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. It is under intensive development by the community. It’s a brilliant project and I decided to give something back.
| Beneficiary | Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation |
| URL | rockylinux.org |
| Expertises | Gatsby Tailwind CSS |
My contributions
In this issue, which was open for about 4 months, a suggestion for a dark mode for the website was made. Consequently, I decided to pick it up to research Gatsby and Tailwind CSS and put it into practice at the same time. It was done on April 27th and with minor changes was merged on May 5th 2022. You can see the small changes made by comparing it from here and the Rocky site.
In addition, I noticed was that at the time there were no Dutch translations. I took it upon myself to contribute nearly all of them, with some other people chiming in afterwards.
What I learned
- Tailwind works really well and has more features than Bootstrap.
- Gatsby (a JavaScript based front-end framework) is also awesome and very easy to develop with, some lessons I even put into Majorak.
Why is this project important?
Before Rocky Linux existed there was an operating system called CentOS (Community ENTerprise Operating System), a free enterprise OS built from the same source code as RHEL. It exists downstream of the paid license RHEL. In other words, the code it incorporates has already been tested thoroughly and run in production environments.
CentOS was more reliable and stable than the real product, costing nothing with commercial support generally less expensive. Most importantly, hundreds of thousands of projects, people and companies relied on it.
What went wrong?
After Red Hat took over CentOS in January 2014. After that, they decided to kill the project in late 2020. They replaced it with CentOS Stream. Therefore, countless users of CentOS who had recently upgraded to the latest version, expecting updates for years to come now had no new security updates coming…
The alternatives
- Cough up the RHEL license costs.
- Switch to the less stable CentOS Stream.
Gregory Kurtzner, the original founder of CentOS, decided to step up and create Rocky Linux to fill the void. Rocky not the only alternative, similarly Alma Linux exists, but Rocky Linux above all is the purest and the most neutral one.