Red Hat and Family Release 9.4 and a Rocky Linux Take Down

By EricMesa

- 2 minutes read - 266 words

Red Hat released version 9.4 today. Lots of jargon (including a mention of AI), but one of the big deals considering how long Red Hat support contracts go is the addition of ARM64 as a supported architecture. 9to5Linux also had a summary of the new features.

I remember back before CentOS became CentOS Stream there would always be a long lag time from RHEL releases until CentOS. That’s why I was so surprised to learn that Alma Linux 9.4 is also available today. What I found neatest about Alma is the way they’re distinguishing their distro. Why just go for another RHEL clone? Well, in this case Alma Linux is decided to support hardware that had been deprecated by Red Hat. So now they get to position their disto as a useful alternative, not just a free offering - more important now that you can have up to 16 free RHEL licenses.

On the other hand Rocky Linux is the spiritual successor to CentOS and as of the time that I write this, 9.4 is not yet available. Even though the following post was written over a month ago, it was just surfaced to me by the algorithm today: The Case Against Rocky Linux. The author makes some pretty bold claims and seems to have receipts (in the form of links to their sources). However, many in the comments disagree with the points made by the author. I could be wrong, but I think nowadays there’s less of a problem with moving from one RHEL derivative to a another if anything were to happen to Rocky.