To stay in step with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation has officially released AlmaLinux 8.4. This enterprise-grade 1:1 binary replacement for RHEL is the second stable release of AlmaLinux. The biggest feature added to the latest release is support for Secure Boot. 

Other features found in the latest release include support for OpenSCAP, the release of a devel repo (which includes extra packages and build dependencies that are not included in the upstream distribution), a few new module streams (such as Python 3.9, SWIG 4.0, Subversion 1.14, Redis 6, PostgreSQL 13, MariaDB 10.5), and updates to compilers (such as GCC Toolset 10, LLVM Toolset 11.0.0, Rust Toolset 1.49.0, Go Toolset 1.15.7). 

Another change is that the PowerTools repo has been disabled by default (to match upstream distribution) and moved to a separate configuration file (almalinux-powertools.repo).

Of this release, Jack Aboutbouls, community manager of AlmaLinux, said, “Our community, partners and sponsors all worked together, at warp speed no less, to provide the very latest, best and stable community-driven, governed and free open source alternative to the former incarnation of CentOS." Aboutbouls continued, "The open source world was nervously watching the past few months wondering how feasible this new reality would be, and for us to produce something suitable for real-world, actively-running workloads so quickly and efficiently is truly a testament to our provenance, the power of community and the open source model.”

Download an ISO copy of AlmaLinux 8.4 from one of the many available mirrors.