v8.5 sounds about right, I don’t recall the specifics.
I make so little use of the desktop that I don’t notice or care about any differences – Gnome has been just fine for me.
At home use I mostly have used Linux Mint (XFCE), but I decided to install Rocky Linux 9 on my work laptop, beside Windows 11 Pro, in dualboot mode. I am using the default GNOME, it is ok even though on Mint I prefer XFCE. I did try XFCE also with Rocky Linux, but it felt a bit different and weird compared to Mint XFCE, so I switched back to GNOME.
Choosing Rocky Linux (or RHEL in general) for this particular laptop was a good decision because the Windows 11 Pro partition is encrypted with BitLocker, and Secure Boot is enabled, both of which are employer requirements. Installing Rocky Linux 9 beside it turned out to be pretty easy, at least when I created a separate partition for Rocky’s /boot/efi/.
I tried out also Linux Mint, but it insisted I must disable Windows BitLocker before I can install it beside Windows. I didn’t want to do that even if I could have probably enabled BitLocker again afterwards. Rocky Linux didn’t require anything like this, at least with the separate /boot/efi/ partition. I tried a similar partition with Linux Mint but ended up with a non-bootable system, not sure how I could have fixed that or if it could have been fixed anyway. No such issue with Rocky Linux.
I also considered Manjaro, but its installation instructions insisted I should disable Secure Boot, which I didn’t want to do on this work laptop. So yeah, Rocky Linux it is, and now that I got NVidia drivers installed and video codecs to work in Firefox, it works great. I am starting to like it even more than Linux Mint.
Another advantage with Rocky Linux (compared to Mint) is that the EOL is much further in the future for Rocky 9.x, so by the time that comes, this laptop is probably not working anymore anyway, and has been replaced already.
I use Rocky Linux with MATE as a daily driver, it is grreat, but when will it get thumbnails in the GTK file picker? This would be great. Is this when the final release of GTK 4.4 comes out? Because this is all I need to have Rocky Linux as a perfect desktop OS.
I tried running Rocky 8.7 and then 9.1 (Both GNOME) as my work laptop’s main OS. It was perfectly fine and usable but just a tad outdated for my use case in terms of language versions and Neovim, which meant I couldn’t compile certain things easily, nor use the latest version of NvChad. I moved over to to Fedora 38 and it’s a better fit. I miss Rocky’s stability but the tradeoff for a more current kernel and apps is worth it.
Can u not update Firefox from the Application Menu>Help>about dialog ?
Apparently not I see …
I use Firefox Developer and you can update there from said dialog.
Download via Firefox Developer Edition
Last used https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-devedition-latest-ssl&os=linux64&lang=en-GB
mkdir -p /opt/mozilla/firefox/developer
tar --overwrite -xpf <path>/firefox-dev.tar.bz2 -C /opt/mozilla/firefox/developer # creates sub dir firefox
ln -s /opt/mozilla/firefox/developer/firefox/firefox-bin /usr/bin/firefox-dev
\cp -f <path>/firefox-dev.desktop /usr/share/applications/firefox-dev.desktop
Can’t recall where the .desktop file came from but contents are ;
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Firefox Developer Edition
GenericName=Web Browser
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox-dev %u
Icon=/opt/mozilla/firefox/developer/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default/default128.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;application/vnd.mozilla.xul+xml;text/mml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;
StartupNotify=true
Categories=Network;WebBrowser;
Keywords=web;browser;internet;
Actions=new-window;new-private-window;
StartupWMClass=Firefox Developer Edition
[Desktop Action new-window]
Name=Open a New Window
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox-dev %u
[Desktop Action new-private-window]
Name=Open a New Private Window
Exec=/usr/bin/firefox-dev --private-window %u
(Maybe the downloaded (as opposed OS pre-installed) version of FF standard allows you to update too, dunno, haven’t tried it)
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Happy camper with a heavily customized Rocky Linux 8 + KDE from EPEL on my workstation & laptop.
Cheers,
Niki
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@bobar : Much to my surprise, that Firefox Developer Edition actually works. Looks like it comes with its own libraries and so does not run into compatibility issues with the library versions in Rocky 8.8. Now I’ll have to see how much of my current profile is compatible. Thanks for the pointer and instructions.
I am using rocky 8.7 as my desktop os
previously i was on cent os 7 and moved to rocky
I asked EPEL to build Compiz for Rocky9 and they did.
It works nice with Xfce that I use also on Fedora.
For quite a while I was running Running Rocky 8.7 now 9.2 on ocelot, as well a openSUSE 15.4, and now 15.5 (separate NVMe drives). Both running KDE
D’Cat
Hi All
definitely not running any Rhel derived OS as a desktop.
Instead I use the upstream fedora KDE spin, which to all intents is (well almost) exactly the same to administer.
My opinion is that the desktop benefits from the many bleeding edge workflow advancements.
The server benefits from conservative advancements that are tried and tested and don’t change every six months.
but everyone’s opinion is different, if you are using one of those desktop apps that has a parallel to server apps like oracle then I guess a ultra stable desktop is warranted.
regards peter
Hi everyone,
late for the discussion, yet here is my input:
I am running RockyLinux 9.3 with Cinnamon DE as a development machine of bash/python/go with containers, k8s and bunch infra services. Pretty sure compared to other DE, cinnamon is running smoothly.
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