After CentOS dove into the "stream," AlmaLinux has become one of the favorite replacements for the free take on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If users and businesses ever had any doubts about how well AlmaLinux would be able to keep up with RHEL, look no further than the release of 8.5 Stable as a bellwether on how well the fledgling platform will be able to keep up with the stalwart champ of enterprise Linux.

Within 48 hours of the RHEL 8.5 release, AlmaLinux 8.5 Stable was made available. This is the third stable release of the OS, which speaks to the commitment the AlmaLinux Foundation has made to deliver on its promises.

The latest release of AlmaLinux includes improvements to container management tools, module streams, as well as enhancements and additions to System Roles. Other additions/improvements have been applied to the web-based GUI, Cockpit, OpenJDK (version 17 now available), personal access tokens, Network Time Security (NTS) for Network Time Protocol (NTP),  SCAP Security Guide, Ruby (3.0), PHP (7.4.19), Node.js (16), NGINX (1.20), Squid (4.15), Mutt (2.0.7), GCC (11), LLVM (12.0.1), Rust (1.54.0), and new repositories for ResilientStorage and Plus.

Find out more by reading the full release notes and downloading AlmaLinux 8.5.