CloudLinux Announces AlmaLinux As Their 1:1 RHEL Fork, Alternative To CentOS

Following the surprise announcement last month that CentOS 8 will be discontinued at EOY2021 with CentOS Stream to be the new upstream for RHEL, several different organizations and developers have announced their intentions to create new community-oriented, open-source rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that will be free. One of the promising announcements so far has been from CloudLinux and today they have announced it as AlmaLinux.

CloudLinux, which provides a CentOS-based Linux distribution catering to shared hosting providers, announced in December they would be working on their own replacement to CentOS. They said this drop-in CentOS alternative would be supported by them with $1 million USD annually for development.

Originally they called the effort "Project Lenix" while now their new CentOS replacement will be called AlmaLinux. The AlmaLinux distribution continues aiming as a 1:1 compatibility fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and to offer a clean migration path from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux.

CloudLinux claims they intend to support AlmaLinux at least through 2029 for its RHEL8-based distribution. They intend for the initial AlmaLinux release to happen in Q1.

The basic details on their plans until actually releasing the distribution can be found via AlmaLinux.org and the CloudLinux blog.

Another promising effort started out of last month's announcement is RockyLinux.org as a community-driven effort. Like AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux has yet to ship a release either. Some are also considering the likes of Oracle Linux as another RHEL-compatible free enterprise Linux distribution option.