Rocky and Alma Linux Still Going Strong. RHEL Adds an AI Assistant (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0178049951
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/06/14/1947215/rocky-and-alma-linux-still-going-strong-rhel-adds-an-ai-assistant
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/14/rocky_alma_and_rhel_10/
> The [3]Rocky 10 release notes describe what's new, such as support for RISC-V computers. Balancing that, this version only supports the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 series; it drops Rocky 9.x's support for the older Pi 3 and Pi Zero models...
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> RHEL 10 itself, and Rocky with it, now require x86-64-v3, meaning Intel "Haswell" generation kit from about 2013 onward. Uniquely among the RHELatives, AlmaLinux offers a separate build of version 10 for x86-64-v2 as well, meaning Intel "Nehalem" and later — chips from roughly 2008 onward. AlmaLinux has a history of still supporting hardware that's been dropped from RHEL and Rocky, which it's been doing [4]since AlmaLinux 9.4 . Now that includes CPUs. In comparison, the system requirements for Rocky Linux 10 are the same as for RHEL 10. The release notes say.... "The most significant change in Rocky Linux 10 is the removal of support for x86-64-v2 architectures. AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures for x86-64-v3 are now required."
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> A significant element of the advertising around RHEL 10 involves how it has an AI assistant. This is called [5]Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed , and you can use it right from a shell prompt, as the [6]documentation describes ... It's much easier than searching man pages, especially if you don't know what to look for... [N]either AlmaLinux 10 nor Rocky Linux 10 includes the option of a helper bot. No big surprise there... [Rocky Linux] is sticking closest to upstream, thanks to [7]a clever loophole to obtain source RPMs . Its hardware requirements also closely parallel RHEL 10, and CIQ is working on certifications, compliance, and special editions. Meanwhile, AlmaLinux is maintaining support for older hardware and CPUs, which will widen its appeal, and working with partners to ensure reboot-free updates and patching, rather than CIQ's keep-it-in-house approach. All are valid, and all three still look and work almost identically... except for the LLM bot assistant.
[1] https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-10-0-ga-release
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/14/rocky_alma_and_rhel_10/
[3] https://docs.rockylinux.org/release_notes/10_0/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/almalinux_94_ciq_lts_kernels/
[5] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux-10/lightspeed
[6] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-enterprise-linux-lightspeed-let-ai-teach-you-linux
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/04/rocky_linux_rhel_loopholes/
Red Hat is a traumatized company (Score:3)
In 2006, when Red hat was a "small"company, with a market cap of only ~U$D 3 Milliards, a much bigger company (~24x the size) called Oracle, with a market cap of ~ USD 73 Milliards copied their homework wholesale.
Making their own package manager like Debian's DPKG or Suse's Zypper? Nope, they lifted RPM wholesale.
Doing their own testing and integration to be sure that all packages included in the distro from upstream play nice with one another, like Suse, canonical or pretty much every other distro did? Nope, they took every single one, the same exact version RedHat validated, therefore diminishing Oracle's testing load.
Making their own backporting of patches from Upstream? Nope, they took Red Hat patches wholesale.
Oracle even brazenly trumpeted themselves as "Bug for Bug Compatible with RHEL", like that was some pride badge.
And remeber, all this from a company ~24x the size...
I guess that left an indelible mark on RH people, from Junior Engineers at the time, to the top Brass of the company.
So, no wonder RedHat is doing everything in their power (and then some) to hinder the copycats/lazycats.
Too bad that smaller distros like Scientific Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux et al are collateral damage in this war.
JM2C
YMMV
Lightspeed (Score:2)
It should be mentioned that Lightspeed only answers questions about Red Hat products and related topics, like compilers and open source software. It also does not always answer truthfully. For example, I asked Lightspeed about working with boot environments on RHEL and it told me this feature was available by default (false) and provided me with a link to on-line documentation which went to an invalid URL (HTTP error 404). It also gave incorrect instructions for enabling extra repositories like EPEL and RP
Re: (Score:2)
Why should Red Hat's AI be any different than anyone else's?
I will say (Score:2)
We've been running AlmaLinux for as long as it's been available - and I've been very happy with it. I also appreciate the amount of work the AlmaLinux team puts into their distribution, sometimes even beating Red Hat to the punch when it comes to patching vulnerabilities.