Downstream of RHEL, not upstream like Fedora

Rocky Linux exists specifically to be binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, built by the Rocky Linux community following RHEL's own releases — the relationship is the reverse of Fedora's. Fedora is where new packages and kernel versions land first, feeding upstream into RHEL over time; Rocky tracks RHEL's release cadence directly, trading bleeding-edge packages for the same stability and long support windows RHEL itself offers. If the point of testing in a VM is to catch problems before they hit a production RHEL-family server, Rocky is the closer match — Fedora will show you problems Rocky won't have yet, and hide problems Rocky will actually hit.

Official aarch64 ISOs, current and straightforward

Rocky Linux 10.2 publishes real aarch64 installer images — a full DVD ISO (around 9GB, every package for offline installation) and a smaller Minimal ISO (around 2GB, just enough to run the installer and pull what you need over the network) — from rockylinux.org. For a VM workspace, the Minimal ISO is the practical choice, the same role Ubuntu Server's or Debian's netinst images play in their own posts on this blog.

Not in the official-image picker — the local-file path

Rocky isn't part of Velo Workspaces' curated official-image list. Download the Minimal ISO yourself and use "choose a local OS image file" when creating the workspace — the installer (Anaconda, the same one RHEL and Fedora both use) walks you through the rest, and it'll look immediately familiar if you've installed Fedora in a workspace already.

What actually carries over from the Fedora post — and what doesn't

Rocky and Fedora share real DNA: both use dnf as the package manager, and both ship SELinux enforcing by default rather than the permissive-or-off defaults some distros use — the enforcement mechanics covered in the Fedora post apply here without modification. What doesn't carry over is the release model: Rocky's packages are older and more conservative by design, chosen for compatibility with RHEL rather than for having the newest available version, and Rocky's Rosetta setup for x86-64 binaries follows RHEL's own tooling conventions rather than Fedora's, so don't assume the exact steps transfer without checking.

Related reading: Fedora on Apple Silicon, the closer relative worth reading alongside this one, Ubuntu on Apple Silicon for the official-picker path this one skips, and what a disposable development environment actually is. Or download Velo Workspaces and try it yourself.