AMD Now Backing AlmaLinux As This Increasingly Popular RHEL/CentOS Alternative

AMD is now among the latest companies backing the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for that increasingly popular free build derived from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources now that CentOS 8 is end-of-life.

AlmaLinux as the Linux distribution started from CloudLinux for providing binary-compatibility with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is approaching the one year anniversary since its first stable release. Ahead of that 30 March anniversary, the foundation announced today a new set of corporate members. The new backers for AlmaLinux include Sine Nomine Associates, BlackHOST, Knownhost, and arguably most notable is AMD.

Other existing backers of AlmaLinux include the likes of Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Arm, Equinix, Hivelocity, and various other hosting organizations and companies. Notably absent from the current backers list is Intel.

AlmaLinux is finding increasing use by public cloud service providers, dedicated web hosting servers, and other environments where formerly CentOS had a stronghold until the Red Hat decision to premature EOL CentOS 8 at the end of 2021. Given AMD's market successes with EPYC in the data center, it doesn't come as much of a surprise to see them now backing this no-cost alternative to RHEL.

Backers to the AlmaLinux OS Foundation provide funding for its continued development of the operating system and help drive its direction by voting and participating within the foundation's board of directors.

More details on the new and existing AlmaLinux OS Foundation members and other information on this CentOS/RHEL alternative via AlmaLinux.org.

AMD has also backed other Linux operating systems over the years ranging from being a longtime sponsor of openSUSE (and close partner of SUSE) to the failed efforts around MeeGo Linux, among others.