Rocky and Alma Linux Still Going Strong. RHEL Adds an AI Assistant (theregister.com) 19
Rocky Linux 10 "Red Quartz" has reached general availability, notes a new article in The Register — surveying the differences between "RHELatives" — the major alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
The 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...
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 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."
A significant element of the advertising around RHEL 10 involves how it has an AI assistant. This is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed, and you can use it right from a shell prompt, as the 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 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.
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 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."
A significant element of the advertising around RHEL 10 involves how it has an AI assistant. This is called Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lightspeed, and you can use it right from a shell prompt, as the 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 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.
I will say (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
>"We've been running AlmaLinux for as long as it's been available - and I've been very happy with it."
We have been too. So far, so good. I hope Alma 10 is great as well.
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
Re: (Score:2)
Making their own package manager like Debian's DPKG or Suse's Zypper? Nope, they lifted RPM wholesale.
That's literally the whole idea behind all of this software, though. They just forgot somehow.
Re: (Score:1)
Fedora is published under the MIT license. It's a pretty liberal license that allows copying for whatever use. I wasn't aware of Oracle copying Fedora, but that would have been allowed under its license. The only requirement would have been retaining of the copyright notice.
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/fedora-linux-license/
Re: Red Hat is a traumatized company (Score:2)
OL is a RHEL clone not Fedora, they're bound by the GPL, which still allows it.
Re: (Score:3)
Sure. No one says they have to make their SPRMs or github repo for the spec files publicly-accessible. Where they crossed the line, though, is in contractually preventing their clients from being able to exercise their rights under the terms of the GPL. As a Red Hat customer, you can go download the SRPMs just fine, but under the terms of your contract with Red Hat, if you distribute those SRPMs to anyone else, that is grounds for termination of the support contract. This is at odds with any version of the
Re: Red Hat is a traumatized company (Score:1)
This is at odds with any version of the GPL, which applies to a lot of Red Hat's packages.
It's not. They give you a 1.0 binary, they have to give you the source to 1.0. You can share that 1.0 GPL source or do whatever the GPL allows with it, and RedHat is fully within their rights to terminate your support contract and not offer you updated 1.2 binaries. Nothing in the GPL says you can't sell it, or once you sell someone a GPL work you must always make future versions available. So if they don't sell it to you they don't have to give you the source. You're within your rights to share the GPL sou
Re: (Score:3)
No, you misread what I wrote. "Any version" refers to the version of the GPL. GPLv2, GPLv3, or whatever. Nothing to do with the version of the software package.
Put another way, whether the code in question is GPLv2 or GPLv3, the right to redistribute the source code is that same.
Poor choice of words on my part. Sorry about that.
Re: Red Hat is a traumatized company (Score:2)
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...
Oracle Enterprise Linux didn't do anything that CentOS wasn't already.
Bug for bug compatible is exactly what the RHEL compatible kernel should be, and they provide their own kernel (UEK) you conveniently left out, which is a back port of upstream kernel patches to their own supported baseline. Whatever, you'll probably say that's "just the kernel" it's pointless. No, they didn't reinvent RPM which somehow makes them evil .. and we don't talk about CentOS. Or the obvious fact that the changes and buy and kil
Re: (Score:2)
As to Red Hat being a traumatized company, well they are now very successful and profitable. It's time for them to get over the trauma. Besides, although they put in a lot of work and polish, their product is based largely on the work of others, so they are hardly in a position to accuse Oracle of playing unfairly by using GPL'd code they worked on.
Lightspeed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lightspeed (Score:4, Funny)
Why should Red Hat's AI be any different than anyone else's?
Re: (Score:2)
Red Hat's Lightspeed _only_ talks about Red Hat software and related topics and _still_ gets it wrong. It's an almost infinitely smaller scope, but its answers are still terrible.
Re: (Score:2)
Ask it about "LightSpeed Brand Briefs" [youtu.be] and see what it does...
New Risc-V support! (Score:1)
Rocky is supporting an entire new architecture and sending patches upstream. I thought they were just "freeloaders" who didn't contribute anything back... /s
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, a Fedora group is the one driving the RISC-V efforts. It is great that Rocky is involved though.