Hi, I’m Ronaldo, from Brazil, has been a while I’m using Linux, I think started on 90’s, then I knew CentOS and It became my main distribution. As a DevOps I installed CentOS as server at work. Stable, safe and strong, better distro ever! So happy with that! But someone wasn’t, Red hat try to fight against it giving more support to Fedora what’s takes no effect, so they kept trying, then came Centos Stream what was still worse. As CentOS was getting more in trouble and less support your end was announced, but it’s so hard to hear that, and we have a hope that somebody could do something. Then start to look for an alternative searching which distro could be the best candidate, then between Alma distro and Rocky I took Rocky as successor. Installed Rocky in my laptop and It’s works very well, even my touchpad, that did not work on CentOS 7, works just fine, my thoughts “just one more distro like Ubuntu with RPMs”, no offense! The development tools are working very well, everything is to perfect, I’m happy. Today, after a month, the penny drops hard advertising me that CentOS will not come back, I started Rocky and it has updates to do, then It ask me to reboot in that moment I freeze trying to understand, after 30 years of Linux don’t remember if this happened in any moment! Is Gregory still there? But its ok, I got to adjust myself to the new strange times.
Are you, by any chance, referring to the “GUI convenience” by PackageKit that at least on GNOME sessions tells ordinary users that updated packages are available and offers to install them for you?
If you let it do its thing, then you don’t need admin privileges, but the way it updates packages has it reboot the machine to state where only the package update runs and afterwards reboots to normal mode. This ensures that applications are not in use while they are updated and also that the most recent version of kernel, glibc, etc core items are in use after the operation.
You don’t have to use that. You can always:
sudo dnf up
sudo needs-restarting -r
If the latter recommends a reboot, then reboot.
I would change that last line to
sudo dnf needs-restaring -r
It’s understandable to feel disappointed about the end of CentOS, especially after so many years of reliance. Rocky Linux seems like a promising alternative, but it’s important to be patient with new distributions as they mature.