We do have testing/release candidate images you are free to test (though they are soon to be outdated and replaced with newer “production” images). Majority of our testing and discussion related is on our mattermost.
The tentative dates for release are between July 7th and the 14th.
Yes, what is there will be what ends up being the release version. From a release engineering perspective, we do this on purpose with all of our releases. The release that ends up being final sits in a folder that still has “RCX” in its name despite the images not having RC in their name, on the off chance that something could be wrong even with the stuff we consider “final”. If something came up, you’d probably see an RC3 but we’ve never had that happen so far.
So I can use that ISO to install Rocky 9 and it will become final by updates right? Like Fedora does. Official Redhat RCs cannot do this as far as I know, full reinstallation is required from official release ISO.