Just putting it out there - we migrated from Centos 7 to Rocky 8.x in our Production environment. Although not officially supported, we are actively ( and successfully) using these apps. Is anyone else using unsupported software successfully?
I use a fair bit of software that I wrote myself, and numerous rpms that I’ve collected and compiled that were originally for various versions of Fedora when they don’t appear in one of the “standard” repos for Centos/Rocky.
Is that the question you’re asking?
Majority of our applications are academic and not packaged as RPMs. We install them with regular account into network share, so their files never mingle with managed content nor have elevated privileges. Some do get regular updates from their developers, some tools were released decades ago and barely run on current systems (still running CentOS 7, planning to migrate to 9).
The main thing in supported software is that the vendor actively maintains it and therefore releases security and bug fixes. The vendor/source does nothing, if unsupported software breaks or becomes liability. Well, if you get software that is not maintained for Rocky, then _you _ are the “vendor” and it is up to you to refetch/patch your version when there is a need.
If you have software only from Rocky’s repos, then you can easily show that you do dnf up regularly, so your systems are as good as Rocky can be, Rocky releases those updates as quickly from RHEL sources as they can, and Red Hat provides those patched sources as they do. If there is a problem, it is something that Red Hat has not yet (or won’t) fix.
If you have software from elsewhere, then it is more on you to keep it safe. On home desktop that is fine. As part of service that you sell someone, …