With Liberty Linux, SUSE claims to have a good alternative ready for users who did not yet want to say goodbye to CentOS Linux 8. The arrival of Liberty Linux is ideal now that free support for CentOS Linux 8 is about to end.
After this month, CentOS Linux 8 will no longer receive support. Red Hat, in fact, discontinued CentOS Linux. The end of support was previously set for the last day of 2021, but due to the holidays, Red Hat moved the deadline to Jan. 31, 2022. After this date, it will only be possible to pay CloudLinux to continue using CentOS 8 securely.
Now, a worthy replacement for CentOS Linux 8 is already emerging, with the new distro being marketed by SUSE. The good news is that SUSE is shaping the alternative by looking away from CentOS 8, so it is aiming for near-perfect RHEL 8 compatibility.
Details
Currently, not all details about Liberty Linux have been released. It is known that Liberty Linux will be an equivalent of the current RHEL 8.5, once it appears on the market. Likewise, compatibility is guaranteed with Red Hat’s additional Enterprise Linux packages, EPEL.
The build of Liberty Linux is done with Red Hat’s official Source RPMs. Only the kernel is an exception to this rule. In fact, this component comes from SUSE itself, but is ported using a Red Hat-compatible configuration.
The new distro will be supported by SUSE Manager and Ubuntu. The update policy will not be changed.
Other preferences
Liberty Linux, however, is not a complete copy of CentOS 8, as SUSE puts its own touches on the new distro. RHEL drivers and kernels are unlikely to work with Liberty Linux. That’s because Liberty Linux presumably comes with kernel 5.3.18. In fact, the same version is in openSUSE Leap, the free version of SUSE Linux. This makes the kernel much newer than that of RHEL 8.5, which is still running at 4.18. There are suspicions, however, that SLE drivers still work.
Furthermore, only the x86-64 instruction set is supported. This causes problems with POWER and Arm chips.
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