Hi! I’ve been working on a little side project I’d like to share for anyone interested: Skip’s Rocky Desktop Spin! (formerly called “No Compromises ISO” - as in no compromises for usability or desktop ease of use.
I appreciate you giving it a spin, and letting me know what you think! It’s a live iso, so you can play with it without mashing the install button.
A bit of detail:
I love Rocky + Enterprise Linux, but am in a bit of a pickle: I greatly prefer Mate (based on the old Gnome2 environnment), and really dislike Gnome3. If I want a Rocky 10 desktop, clearly something needed to be done .
I then developed a Live ISO that installs and customizes a friendly MATE desktop, with all the GUI bells and whistles that I hope will make it friendly even for a Linux beginner. Scripts and sources for building the ISO here: https://git.resf.org/skip/No-Compromises-ISO/src/branch/rocky10 (It’s Lorax/LiveMediaCreator + kickstarts)
A few features of the desktop at-a-glance:
Nvidia driver pre-installed, should work out of the box (no secureboot support though)
MATE traditional desktop with the advanced “friendly” menu. Pre-configured for ease of use
Compiz included (not enabled by default) for fancy 3d windowing effects, wobbly windows, and all that fun stuff
Flatpak + Software GUI with Flathub enabled by default. Vast array of apps searchable and installable out of the box (my Steam games work!)
Firefox (with all streaming working) , LibreOffice, and some other expected productivity software to get you going
Media should all work out of the box: VLC + Celluloid included, and all that mp4/h264/h265 video stuff should Just Work
Oh, and side note: The MATE Copr repo should work with other Enterprise Linux based distros (RHEL 10), not just Rocky. It likely would work with CentOS Stream 10 as well, though I haven’t tried that yet. If you want to use the repo or attempt a build vs. another distro in the Enterprise Linux family, I’d love to hear your results with that too!
Yes, this is correct. Unfortunately Rocky 10 (and also RHEL 10 / CentOS Stream 10) require x86_64-v3 processor support or newer. In practice this means hardware released in the last 8 years or so. Rocky 9 supports x86_64-v2 , which extends it to hardware in the past ~12 years.
I will say, I’ve switched my personal desktop and laptop to this spin (eating my own dogfood), and it is working brilliantly. At least for my desktop Linux use case .
I’m testing out EL10.1 and trying to add the Mate desktop but I’m getting this error:
sudo dnf groupinstall "MATE-Desktop"
Copr repo for MateDesktop-EL10 owned by skip77 0.0 B/s | 0 B 00:24
Errors during downloading metadata for repository 'copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:skip77:MateDesktop-EL10':
- Curl error (6): Could not resolve hostname for https://download.copr.fedorainfracloud.org/results/skip77/MateDesktop-EL10/rhel+epel-10-x86_64/repodata/repomd.xml [Could not resolve host: download.copr.fedorainfracloud.org]
Error: Failed to download metadata for repo 'copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:skip77:MateDesktop-EL10': Cannot download repomd.xml: Cannot download repodata/repomd.xml: All mirrors were tried
I completed the prior steps of enabling epel / crb and the devel repository. Then, I copied the preformatted repo file into ../yum.repos.d/skip77-MateDesktop-EL10.repo
When I received the above error I then did:
sudo dnf copr enable skip77/MateDesktop-EL10
which produced this error:
Do you really want to enable copr.fedorainfracloud.org/skip77/MateDesktop-EL10? [y/N]: y
Error: Failed to connect to https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/skip77/MateDesktop-EL10/repo/epel-10/dnf.repo?arch=x86_64: Name or service not known
That path differs from the path in the repo file. In my browser I can browse to this path and find the repmd.xml file w/o issue so I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong here.
Just commenting here that the Mate Desktop install on RL10.1 is working as expected. This is running in a Vbox vm on F43. Until this setup survives a point update I will not consider using RL10 on real hardware. I do intend to build BackupPC as a project.
I identified the network issue to be the fact I did not set a dns server in the config. It was not apparent for local ssh connections in the bridged device. I had switched back to a nat device which worked just fine.
OK how did you get MATE install on RL 10.1.? Is RL10.1 a LIVE distro or did you start with something else and added MATE? I started with the RL 10.1 KDE LIVE distro and managed to get it installed as a VM using VMware Workstation Player 25H2. I simply not a big fan of XYZ.0 or XYZ.1 installs… other than as a Virtual Machine. (Right now I am also Kicking the Tires of openSUSE 16.0 as well. openSUSE is saying that unless you like living on the bleeding edge stick with openSUSE 15.6. I have both Rocky Linux 9.7 and openSUSE 15.6 as INSTALLED OS, not as VM.)
No this should not be a problem for me I am running an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 Core CPU with 128 GiB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Graphics Card
I did a minimal install of RL10.1 from the boot.iso or netinstall.iso I can’t remember.
Did you go to the link skip posted for his copr repo and follow the instructions found there?
True, but according to their other thread that they started at the same time they posted here, see: Rocky Linux 10.1 and Desktop Environments of which you’ve replied to already - they made a clean install. So, at that point it’s a case of whether you want Mate or you want KDE.
It’s probably easier to install the system from Skip’s Mate ISO and then add KDE, rather than the other way around - at least going by the fact they’ve had issues with that and posted about it here.
Had the system been in use for a long time, then it’d make sense to find a solution for it. But if it’s a clean install, probably quicker to reinstall than diagnose the issues.
Sorry, haven’t checked on this in a while. I’ve been running this on my own hardware, and it seemed to upgrade to 10.1 pretty smoothly.
But I’ll try some different scenarios: clean 10.0 install with a Mate groupinstall, clean 10.1 install with a Mate groupinstall, and updating my 10.0 ISO to 10.1. If rebuilds or changes are necessary in the COPR, I’ll make them!
I think there will always be a bit of a bumpy transition between minor versions for anyone relying on EPEL. New minor version .x packages are not released 100% in sync with RHEL or Rocky, or any of the other clone distros. So there’s always a period there where dnf update might conflict for a week or 2, then be smooth sailing as Rocky (or EPEL maintainers) catch up.
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