Its name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh. In response, Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of Rocky Linux support provider CIQ and one of the original founders of CentOS, announced that he would start a new project to achieve the original goals of CentOS.

On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that they would discontinue development of CentOS, which had been a production-ready downstream version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in favor of a newer upstream development variant of that operating system known as 'CentOS Stream'. Rocky Linux 8 will be supported through May 2029. The first release candidate version of Rocky Linux was released on April 30, 2021, and its first general availability version was released on June 21, 2021. Rocky Linux, along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise, has become popular for enterprise operating system use. The project's aim is to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system. It is intended to be a downstream, complete binary-compatible release using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system source code. Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is a privately owned benefit corporation that describes itself as a 'self imposed not-for-profit'.

RPM ( DNF), Flatpak - graphical front-ends: GNOME Software, dnfdragoraģ-clause BSD and various free software licenses, plus proprietary firmware files

Rocky Linux 9.0, showing its desktop environment GNOME 40.ĩ.1 / 26 November 2022 (4 months ago) ( )Ĩ.7 / 14 November 2022 (5 months ago) ( )ĭesktop computers, servers, supercomputers

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