AlmaLinux Releases Beta of Their CentOS/RHEL 8 Fork

AlmaLinux describes itself as "an open-source, community-driven project that intends to fill the gap left by the demise of the CentOS stable release." And now AlmaLinux "has announced their beta release of their CentOS/RHEL 8 fork," writes Slashdot reader juniorkindergarten.

AlmaLinux will be getting $1 million a year in development funding from CloudLinux (the company behind CloudLinux OS, a CentOS clone with over 200,000 active server instances). Their CEO stresses that AlmaLinux "is built with CloudLinux expertise but will be owned and governed by the community. We intend to deliver this forever-free Linux distribution this quarter." And they've committed to supporting it through 2029.

Their press release touts AlmaLinux as "a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8, with an effortless migration path from CentOS to AlmaLinux. Future RHEL releases will also be forked into a new AlmaLinux release."

From the AlmaLinux blog: We've collected community feedback and built our new beta release around what you would expect from an enterprise-level Linux distribution...inspired by the community and built by the engineers and talent behind CloudLinux. Visit https://almalinux.org to download the Beta images.

With the Beta release deployed, we'd like to ask the community to be involved and provide feedback. We aim to build a Linux distribution entirely from community contributions and feedback. During AlmaLinux Beta, we ask for assistance in testing, documentation, support and future direction for the operating system. Together, we can build a Linux distribution that fills the gap left by the now unsupported CentOS distribution.
On Wednesday they'll be hosting a live QA webinar with the AlmaLinux team. And there's also a small AlmaLinux forum on Reddit.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Maintenance, support, and more of an industry standard

For a home user it really doesnt matter what you use, use whatever distro you like. In a corporate environment though with thousands of servers all needing to stay in sync, and requiring specific drivers and support from hardware vendors, having one standard that is known to be a solid (if not old) base that is also based on redhat, makes that much easier. Also having specific targets of specific releases with known package availability makes working on

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

Also, if you needed industry grade support, you could just switch to RHEL quite painlessly and pay for support, or use RHEL for production servers and CentOS for your development or cluster servers with completely compatible, often even binary checksum identical components.

Re:

[Kernel Kurtz]

Also, if you needed industry grade support, you could just switch to RHEL quite painlessly and pay for support, or use RHEL for production servers and CentOS for your development or cluster servers with completely compatible, often even binary checksum identical components.

Ah, the good old days....

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Slackware is great until you want to run a precompiled package like KiCad. I found a SlackBuild script but went down library dependency hell with that route. It looked like someone wrote a script to build Flatpak but the github repo says its obsolete and to use the new SBo version, whatever that means. https://github.com/afhpayne/fl... [github.com]

How exactly do I build Flatpak for Slackware?

Re:

[ikhider]

Sbopkg is the 'package manager' if you will, but it's a bit more 'hands-on'. https://sbopkg.org/ [sbopkg.org] It's pretty good as it gives you some info about the packages, you can update it and choose sequence of installation. Sbopkg is better than going straight to the Slackbuilds, unless you really need a custom configuration.

Re:

[jmccue]

Just use Slackware

This, especially when Version 15 is released. It will have PAM so there will be no reason for people to avoid Slackware.

And its support of old releases, though not formal, approaches RHEL even before RHEL went to 10 years.

And unlike many distros, applying patches will not change your settings, new config files are tagged with .new to allow you to review any new settings before applying any config changes

Re:

[ikhider]

When is Slackware 14.3 gonna come out? The last stable is 2016 and current is still spinning. Slackware is well overdue for a new stable and don't tell me 'when it's ready'. We should have had four 'stable's by now.

Re: Why is CentOS so popular?

[aRTeeNLCH]

I did chip design which used to be done on HP-UX systems, then got changed to Linux. But the big software vendors (Cadence, Synopsis, ...) centered on RedHat for support. I tried to tell them that they should specify the library versions that the system required for their software to run, but alas, they would never support a different setup. So clones like CentOS would be fine, but nothing else.

I'm looking forward to trying it out

[93 Escort Wagon]

We have some CentOS 8 virts which are going to be suddenly EOL at the end of the year. Supposedly AlmaLinux will provide a turnkey way of switching those over to their product.

Not to mention I had plans in the works for replacing a few long-in-the-tooth CentOS 7 virts with CentOS 8, only to have the rug pulled out from under me by IBM (let's not pretend that Red Hat still exists, other than as a brand name). I need to see if there are any gotchas - other than the fact that UW doesn't have a mirror, which th

Re:

[SilverNerfer]

Go ahead I've had 2 Almalinux beta VM's (ESXi) running since 1st Feb seem to work really well

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Sounds like a plan - thanks for sharing your experience with it thus far.