Is there a linux equivalent of this setup? I see some mention of RDNA support for linux distros, but it's unclear to me if this is hardware-specific (requires ConnectX or in this case Apple Thunderbolt) or is there something interesting that can be done with "vanilla 10G NIC" hardware?

To get the production level performance, you do need the RDNA compatible hardware.

However, vLLM supports multi node clusters over normal ethernet too https://docs.vllm.ai/en/stable/serving/parallelism_scaling/#...