This CentOS alternative will be available by spring 2021

Rocky Linux, one of the latest new CentOS clones, has announced that its project is targeting to put out a working release sometime in the second quarter of 2021.

Rocky Linux came about when the Red Hat-owned CentOS project recently shifted focus, much to the chagrin of its users.

Miffed at the move, Gregory Kurtzer, one of the original co-founders of CentOS announced Rocky Linux to give the stranded users a viable option to migrate their servers to, before the current release of CentOS reaches its premature end in December 2021.

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Working with the community

In a blog post, Jordan Pisaniello, community manager of Rocky Linux wrote that the team is working to give users a working release to replace their existing CentOS 8 installations before its expiry in December next year.

Pisaniello also shared the project’s progress in the three weeks since it was announced. The core members of the team have incorporated in the US and will soon move an application to have it registered as a non-profit.

He also shared that a number of companies have offered to sponsor the project in the form of developers, hardware, cloud instances, and money. The team has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the primary build platform for development of the distro and are in discussions with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) for sharing resources.

While CentOS/Red Hat continue to defend the move, users are already looking ahead at switching to alternatives. One of the main discussions in Rocky Linux’s very active forums is regarding the tooling for converting existing CentOS installations to Rocky Linux to assist migrations, post its 2021 release.

However, this shouldn’t be much of a challenge and can perhaps take the same approach as Oracle Linux (another high-profile CentOS alternative), which has published a script to convert existing CentOS installations to Oracle Linux.