AlmaLinux 9.0 Released As Community, Free Alternative To Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0

AlmaLinux has been one of the distributions born out of CentOS Linux (non-Stream) going end-of-life and has made a name for itself already in the industry with companies like AMD backing it for those looking at a no-cost/community alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Just one week after RHEL 9.0 went GA, AlmaLinux 9.0 is being officially released today.

It's fantastic seeing AlmaLinux 9.0 already going GA following last week's Red hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 general availability. AlmaLinux 9 beta has been available since April and they were quick to button things up following the upstream RHEL 9.0 debut. If you recall back when RHEL 8.0 went GA in May 2019, it wasn't until September 2019 when CentOS 8.0 released. Multi-week or even multi-month delays haven't been uncommon over the years for these community/no-cost alternatives to RHEL whether it be CentOS, the former Scientific Linux, and others. So seeing AlmaLinux first out of the gate with a RHEL 9.0 based option is quite exciting.

Over the past year AlmaLinux has made quite a name for itself as a no-cost, enterprise Linux distribution alternative to CentOS/RHEL.

As with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, AlmaLinux 9 is making use of the Linux 5.14 kernel, GCC 11 as the system compiler, Python 3.9, and the other same package versions / sources as RHEL9. RHEL/AlmaLinux 9 also emphasize the improvements made to the Cockpit web management interface, kernel live-patching enhancements, container and cloud integration improvements, OpenSSL 3, and a variety of other security improvements.

AlmaLinux 9.0 is available for x86_64, AArch64, POWER PPC64LE, and IBM s390x. Free downloads and more details on AlmaLinux 9.0 via AlmaLinux.org. I'll have up some new AlmaLinux benchmarks soon on Phoronix.