The release of Rocky Linux 10.0 has officially taken place, marking the arrival of a free distribution that is built as a replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and can serve as a successor to the classic CentOS. The new Rocky Linux 10 is binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, offering a suitable alternative for users transitioning from RHEL 10 and CentOS 10 Stream. Moreover, the Rocky Linux 10 branch is set to receive support until 2035.
Installation ISO-images of Rocky Linux have been prepared for multiple architectures including x86-64-V3, Aarch64, PPC64le (IBM Power), S390X (IBM Z), and RISCV64. In addition to the installation images, live-assembly versions with the GNOME and KDE desktop environments are also available for the X86_64 architecture.
Similar to classic CentOS, the key changes in Rocky Linux 10.0 involve the removal of specific Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages such as Redhat-*, Insights-Client, and Subscription-Manager-Migration*. The release includes only 64-bit packages, with all 32-bit packages being eliminated. It is recommended to use containers with 32-bit dependencies for running 32-bit programs.
Notable changes unique to Rocky Linux include the official support for the RISC-V architecture, specifically for the Starfive Visionfive 2 (VF2) and Sifive Premier P550, as well as compatibility with the Qemu emulator. The project is also developing several of its own repositories offering additional packages:
- plus – providing a package with DBMS 8.0.3 (Fork Redis).
- nfv – offering packages for network virtualization developed by the SIG group NFV (Network Functions Virtualization).