The release of the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 version has led to the formation of new distribution, almalinux 9.2 by a separate non-profit organization called Almalinux OS Foundation. This new release is completely binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and can be used as a replacement for RHEL 9.2 and Centos 9 Stream.
Almalinux 9.2 contains all the changes proposed in the latest Rhel release, and the installation images have been prepared for various architectures such as x86_64, ARM64, PPC64le, and S390X, in the form of boot, minimum, and full image. Live assembly will also be formed later, featuring GNOME, KDE, Mate, and XFCE, as well as images for raspberry pi, containers and cloud platforms.
The changes in Almalinux 9.2 are limited to rebranding and removing packets specific to Rhel, such as redhat-*, onsights-callient, subscription-manager-migration*, kpatch*, kmod-realhat-*, rhc, spice*and virtio-win. The distribution is free for all categories of users and all achievements of Almalinux are published under free licenses.
Almalinux 9.2 is based on Cloudlinux, and was created in response to the premature folding of support for Centos 8 Red Hat. The release of updates for Centos 8 was stopped at the end of 2021, instead of the expected 2029. Almalinux OS Foundation was established to develop the distribution on a neutral platform, with the participation of the community and using a management model similar to that of the Fedora project.
Apart from Almalinux, alternatives such as Rocky Linux, Vzlinux, Oracle Linux, Suse Liberty Linux, and Eurolinux are also available. Red Hat has also given the possibility of free use of Rhel in organizations developing open software and for the environments of individual developers, counting up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
To download the installation images of Almalinux, interested users can visit the official website of almalinux.