Or put another way, Red Hat embraces RISC-V and Rocky copies their homework. Rocky is a leech, at least use Alma.
this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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That sounds personal. Why is Alma better than Rocky? I'm just curious and would never switch from my ride or die Debian.
At a quick glance, they just both seem to be spiritual successors to CentOS
Because Rocky does every trick they can to get Red Hat source RPMs (they're the reason Red Hat put the srpms behind a paywall in the first place). CIQ then undercuts, and sells support for Rocky because they don't do any engineering and don't contribute anything upstream. Alma on the other hand bases on CentOS Stream (which is ABI compatible with RHEL) and maintains its own SIGs and contributes back to the project upstream. Rocky is a leech, but Alma actively makes entire ecosystem better.
There it is
The answer to the question you asked?
Yeah
It is not personal.
Alma creates a distro that is ABI compatible with RHEL. They start with what is publicly available in CentOS Stream. They can contribute and innovate. They do the work (however much that is).
Rocky finds a way to get a copy of the RHEL source packages and recompiles them into a distro. They can then claim “bug for bug” compatibility with RHEL. They cannot change anything (cannot contribute) because that would weaken their compatibility promise.
I respect Alma.
Rocky is a free rider for money that wears the shield of “community” when it suits them.
Too personal?
Ah, money. From another quick glance: I see.
I honestly would only shit in a Red Hat if I couldn't find a dirty portajohn so I really don't care. I do understand they are very important in Business (ha!ha!)
I do understand they are very important in Business
So is Ubuntu, which is only a side-step away from Debian. But, while I hate dpkg, at least Debian is ethically clean.
Not according to the Free Software Foundation.
Also, Red Hat contributes more GPL code than Debian does.
Redhat, for at least a decade, has focused on services, with which I already said I have no issue. I haven't seen or heard of anyone paying for Redhat just to get a base imagine with no support.
Alma works diligently to go through each srpm and ensure references to rhel are replaced with alma before building binaries. Rocky just rebrands rhel and rebuilds. Completely different!
Just kidding. I have no idea what kind of work is required to run a project like Rocky or Alma Linux and I appreciate the work both of them do. I just like to be stupid funny.
I just know it's important for someone (multiple someones now) to clone the enterprise system so that anyone who wants it can have it.
CentOS Stream is still that. There is a lot of FUD about it, but it is still ABI compatible with RHEL, it's still an unsupported community project like CentOS was, it is not a rolling release that people seem to think it is... It doesn't have a concept of minor versions, but it won't roll through major versions. RHEL will behave the exact same way if you don't set a release version.