Directly on the heels of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0 release, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation (the non-profit charged with governing the popular CentOS replacement) has announced the release of their latest iteration.

AlmaLinux 9.0 is based on Linux kernel 5.14 and has reached architecture parity with upstream (making it the first OS to achieve this).

According to Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux, “We are building AlmaLinux with the specific goal of creating an independent CentOS successor that is truly community-centric and designed for everyone, whether you’re deploying hybrid multi-cloud solutions, large HPC or VFX clusters, a small business, a home lab, or even for your Raspberry Pi." He adds, "We are pleased to announce AlmaLinux 9, and proud of the progress we have made over the past year, working with upstream and the Stream process, releasing in lockstep with RHEL, adding new architectures, containers, while also helping users every day and growing the AlmaLinux community.”

The main features of AlmaLinux 9 include a number of enhancements to Cockpit (such as more performance metrics, easier data export, the ability to apply kernel live patching, and even build images via a single build node). Other improvements include support for smart card authentication for remote hosts, additional security profiles, more SSSD logging details, integration with OpenSSL 3, and SSH root login disabled by default. 

You'll also find important upgrades, including GCC 11, the latest versions of LLVM, Rust, and Go, Glibc 2.34, Python 3.9, the latest Podman container runtime engine, and Cgroup2.

AlmaLinux is available as standard, micro, mini, and init images for installation.

Download your copy of AlmaLinux and read the full release notes to find out more.