Almalinux, the distribution synchronized with the new release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3, is now available. This distribution, which includes all the proposed changes from Red Hat, can be used as a replacement for Rhel 9.3 and Centos 9 Stream. Installation images are prepared for various architectures such as x86_64, ARM64, PPC64le, and S390X, offering options like boot (940 MB), minimum (1.8 GB), and a complete image (10 GB). Live-assembly options with GNOME, KDE, Mate, and XFCE, as well as images for raspberry pi, containers, and cloud platforms, will also be available later.
The changes in Almalinux 9.3 mainly involve rebranding and removing packets specific to Rhel. Packets such as redhat-*, insights-caliment, subscription-manager-migration*, kpatch*, kmod-realhat-*, rhc, spice*, and virtio-win have been removed. Additionally, the repository of Synergy, which differs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is available for use. Currently, the Synergy repository has already published packages with Pantheon’s user environment, developed by the Elementary OS project, and the Warpinator utility, designed for encrypted file exchange between two computers.
The Almalinux distribution is based on Cloudlinux and aims to provide continued support after the premature end of support for Centos 8. The project is supervised by the Almalinux OS Foundation, a separate non-profit organization that was created to develop the distribution on a neutral platform with community participation. The distribution is free for all categories of users and all its achievements are published under free licenses.
In addition to Almalinux, there are other alternatives such as Rocky Linux (developed by the community under the guidance of the founder of Centos), Vzlinux (prepared by Virtuozzo), Oracle Linux, Suse Liberty Linux, and Eurolinux. Red Hat also offers the possibility of free use of Rhel in organizations developing open software and for individual developers, with a limit of up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Sources: Almalinux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Installation Images,