RHEL clones on the desktop : Rocky vs. CentOS Stream

Rocky Linux Help & Support
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Hi,

The question may sound like a bit of a heresy, but I’d be curious to have your input here. I guess most of us Rocky Linux users here came over when CentOS pulled the rug from under our feet. Me, I’ve been a happy CentOS user since version 4.x, and after the CentOS 8.x debacle, I had a brief stint on Oracle Linux before moving over to Rocky Linux. Currently all (!) my desktops and servers are running Rocky Linux 8.x and 9.x.

In my day job I don’t usually get to choose the hardware. More often than not I have to deal with whatever clients throw at me. And sometimes it happens - like lately in our local university - that a brand new graphic card is not managed by Rocky Linux 9.5. Installer only works in reduced VESA mode and by blacklisting some stuff, and X11 simply doesn’t work.

RHEL 10 is still beta, Fedora is a moving target with a ridiculously short lifespan. I’ve fiddled around with Void Linux and I like it very much, but it’s a rolling release, which is bad to use in production.

I took a peek at the “new” centos.org site, and I was surprised to see that CentOS Stream has five years of support per release. Version 10 is already out as it seems. Now maybe this would be what I need for my desktop needs. Something that’s in between the very conservative RHEL/Rocky releases on one side and then Fedora which is essentially bad for folks with high blood pressure problems.

Before giving it a spin, I wonder. Is the stuff from EPEL available for CentOS Stream ? What about ELRepo and RPMFusion ? How “stable” is it compared to RHEL/Rocky, or how much of a moving target? Can it be installed on older hardware with something like Intel Core i3 or i5 processors ?

Please share your thoughts and/or experiences,

Niki

PS: sorry if this feels like asking a Honda-specific question in a Kawasaki forum. :upside_down_face:

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Yes, why wouldn’t it be? The getting started page even talks about it too. They build against stream first in majority of cases before building for stable.

elrepo explicitly mentions that CentOS Stream is not compatible. If you need newer kernels, maybe it’ll work, but you’re better off using the CentOS kmods sig. rpmfusion may or may not work; they don’t explicitly mention it not working. Try it and find out.

CentOS Stream 9 requires x86-64-v2 at a minimum. CentOS Stream 10 requires x86-64-v3 at a minimum. It’s up to you to determine if your older hardware supports these levels.

[root@xmpp01 ~]# /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --help | grep x86-64-v
  x86-64-v4 (supported, searched)
  x86-64-v3 (supported, searched)
  x86-64-v2 (supported, searched)
2 Likes
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As it mentions “desktop” in the title, it’s also worth reviewing

https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/rhel10-rocky-10-changes/16524/6

In addition, CentOS Stream says
“RHEL is transitioning to providing desktop applications via Flatpak”