I have not tried Rocky Linux. I thought of it as a RedHat clone and a server OS. This past weekend the YouTube channel Explaining Computers had a video that talked of Rocky Linux where he said that it was a Linux distro that was compatible with commercial software, in his case it was Da Vinci Resolve. So I looked at Rocky Linux and they do have a desktop image (several actually) which I downloaded, but have not yet installed. Reading the documentation it appears to be similar to Fedora for package management, while in philosophy and usage it seems very similar to a Debian install. (Root account setup, package management done as root, and sudo not installed.)
Anybody tried/used Rocky Linux as a desktop?
Rocky Linux
Re: Rocky Linux
Rocky and Alma Linux started out as the straight up RHEL recompiles to replace CentOS when Red Hat announced that CentOS was no longer going to be, and instead it would be CentOS stream (a upstream distro rather than freely available recompile).
Rocky was founded by the same person that originally founded CentOS (before being purchased by Red Hat), so had a lot of initial support.
Then when Red Hat changed the way their source code can be accessed (very much against the spirit, if not the actual wording of the GPL IMO), Alma and Rocky have diverged in the path they're taking. They both attempt to remain fully compatible, but are finding different ways of doing so.
In the end, what it means is that if you've ever used RHEL of the same verison as Rocky, you'll be in for essentially an identical experience. While the trademarks are gone, it is otherwise absolutely a trademark-free clone of RHEL.
Rocky was founded by the same person that originally founded CentOS (before being purchased by Red Hat), so had a lot of initial support.
Then when Red Hat changed the way their source code can be accessed (very much against the spirit, if not the actual wording of the GPL IMO), Alma and Rocky have diverged in the path they're taking. They both attempt to remain fully compatible, but are finding different ways of doing so.
In the end, what it means is that if you've ever used RHEL of the same verison as Rocky, you'll be in for essentially an identical experience. While the trademarks are gone, it is otherwise absolutely a trademark-free clone of RHEL.
Re: Rocky Linux
I installed Rocky Linux KDE Workstation on the Lenovo T580. It is the stock Anaconda installer used by Fedora. The distro uses the default Fedora KDE spin theme. You need to setup a root account. When setting up a user account you can set the user to be administrator, which does set up sudo. It would be comfortable to people using Debian's KDE install. It is still on Plasma 5. Even though I downloaded the latest installer, after it was installed there was 2.1GB update to bring Rocky up to date.
Discover is the GUI package and update manager, with dnf forming the backend. The install included the flatpak backend, but you need to manually enable it in Discover. Overall it is a fairly fleshed out KDE install including the full Kontact PIM suite. It also installs Firefox and Libre Office. Dragon is the movie player with Juk as the music player. I installed Konqueror and Elisa. The latest Konqueror uses Kwebengine for web rendering, KHTML for previews of files, and Dophin's backend is used for file management.
Overall it makes for a nice desktop. My current T580 setup has 16GB and Rocky Linux in general use for me (Kate, Elisa, Konqueror and Digikam running it is using 3.5GB of RAM. In a few hours of uptime it has run well, free of glitches smooth app switching and snappy performance. I will be leaving it installed to see how well it holds up over time.
Discover is the GUI package and update manager, with dnf forming the backend. The install included the flatpak backend, but you need to manually enable it in Discover. Overall it is a fairly fleshed out KDE install including the full Kontact PIM suite. It also installs Firefox and Libre Office. Dragon is the movie player with Juk as the music player. I installed Konqueror and Elisa. The latest Konqueror uses Kwebengine for web rendering, KHTML for previews of files, and Dophin's backend is used for file management.
Overall it makes for a nice desktop. My current T580 setup has 16GB and Rocky Linux in general use for me (Kate, Elisa, Konqueror and Digikam running it is using 3.5GB of RAM. In a few hours of uptime it has run well, free of glitches smooth app switching and snappy performance. I will be leaving it installed to see how well it holds up over time.