Hi there,

When doing vfx in my own little office until 2017 I was successfully using CentOS 7 on both 3 HP-workstations and a little renderfarm (12 nodes, still workstations but without GUI).

After making a break for 4 years (worked in a bigger company) I am planning to bring that office back to life with new hardware etc.

Now the big question would be if I should start where I left off 4 years ago using CentOS 7 or switching to Rocky 8.4 or even RHEL 8.4 (with free developer subscription).

I don’t need to have too many apps running, mainly some 3d (Houdini, Maya) as well as 2d (DaVinci and Nuke) - and Pixar Render-manager.

I installed Rocky on an older Lenovo laptop - looks promising with KDE 5 (which is not available on CentOS7 afaik)

What’s your take on Rocky?

Thanks for any insights ..

Since you've been away, you should know that RHEL is changing CentOS and it's days in its current form are numbered: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...em-4175686575/

I don't know anything about Rocky one way of the other, but a sysadmin of my acquaintance thinks that Alma Linux has potential.

If you are willing to look outside the RHEL ecosystem, my recommendation would be Debian.

1 members found this post helpful.

Yeah I know that the days on CentOS 8 are numbered - thats why I didnt touch that at all .. quite a shame.

I think I should stay within RHEL-world (for now at least) as the vfx-industry tends to rely more on that.

Since I'm no linux-expert (yet ):
Is it to be expected that what will run on RHEL 8.4 will run on Rocky 8.4 (or Alma) ?

As I understand it, Rocky and Alma want to become what CentOS was before it was acquired by RHEL, that is, clones of RHEL under the provisions of the GPL.

Note that there might be a time lag between when RHEL does updates and when those updates get incorporated in said clones.

Yep; Rocky & Alma take over where (old) Centos stops ie a fully compatible free downstream version of RHEL.

If you don't mind being a touch upstream, Centos Stream will be the downstream-from-Fedora-slightly-upstream-from-RHEL version ...

HTH

(Prob clearer if you go research that ..)

Didn’t have a look at CentOS Stream yet.. no idea how stable a rolling release would be in production

Maybe worth some research

Last question on that topic:

is there any reason for me to not go directly to RHEL 8.4 developer subscription? It has 16 installations free and self-support. Dont think I would need more nodes.

Might they take that away at some point - and lurk me into paid subscription?

That's the big question - can you trust IBM/Red Hat not to yank the carpet again? :/


I was skeptical of AlmaLinux at first, but they're doing enough things right to feel like the lowest risk option for me.

1 members found this post helpful.

As well as Rocky and Alma, there's also Springdale. That's been around for years, produced by Princeton University for their own use.