Alma releases sooner

Posted Jun 12, 2025 23:58 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
Parent article: Rocky Linux 10.0 released

I think it is interesting that Alma manages to release sooner.

Alma builds their distro themselves from CentOS Stream sources. Rocky builds directly from RHEL SRPMS.

https://wiki.almalinux.org/Comparison.html#build-sources

Yet Alma releases sooner (and with more optional features to boot).

Alma releases sooner

Posted Jun 13, 2025 8:34 UTC (Fri) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

Shouldn't Alma always be sooner, because they don't have to wait for the final SRPMs??

Alma releases sooner

Posted Jun 13, 2025 11:41 UTC (Fri) by mote (guest, #173576) [Link] (2 responses)

Alma has released every version before Rocky - sometimes only a day or two, but they consistently deliver first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux#Releases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Linux#Releases

Anecdotal: I worked in OS systems engineering until last year and had to directly deal with both in relation to SAN and other "big metal" ($$$ proprietary) solutions for some 15 years. Alma consistently was "more RHEL like" in many ways; Rocky did/does not even keep historical RPMs in their repo trees as of like 9.3, making "downgrade your kernel to match a vendor's software needs" a factual impossibility on Rocky systems.

Alma was always our recommended choice to Enterprise customers if they did not want RHEL proper (against our advice, usually) until we eventually took Rocky off the possibles list when those repo shenanigans started around the 9.1 era. Having personally worked bugs for both in their early days, Alma devs were/are more consistently and faster at understanding Enterprise needs and making updates, and were the first to understand how much we needed Archive mirrors for old versions for proprietary software reasons.

Alma releases sooner

Posted Jun 13, 2025 12:34 UTC (Fri) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

That is also my impression. Alma is much more professional than Rocky .. I wouldn't go as far as to say that you should avoid Rocky, but you are more likely to have a rocky ride with Rocky than with Alma ;-).

Alma releases sooner

Posted Jun 14, 2025 16:48 UTC (Sat) by rbtree (guest, #129790) [Link]

Alma also releases updates, including security updates, significantly faster than Rocky. (Oracle is even faster, often with delays of only a couple of hours behind RHEL, but then you're dealing with Oracle...)

Rocky has only been popular because of aggressive marketing, not because of its technical advantages.