AlmaLinux OS 8.3
Mayank Sharma is flabbergasted that someone would spend a million dollars to create a community supported clone of a distro.
IN BRIEF
AlmaLinux is a new Linux distro based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It’s proposed and supported by CloudLinux, although it’s promised to nurture a community around the distro that’ll be put in charge of all subsequent development. Oracle Linux is another RHELbased distro and there will be another soon in the form of Rocky Linux from one of the co-founders of CentOS.
L ate last year, Red Hat pulled the funding for the CentOS project, leaving its developers no option but to shutter it, and instead focus on the newly introduced CentOS Stream distro (see our review in LXF275).
The technical differences notwithstanding, what’s annoyed the community is the decision to prematurely end support for CentOS 8. Originally promised to be supported through to 2029, the distro will now reach a premature end of life at the end of 2021.
Furthermore, even CentOS Stream 8 offers five years of support only, which is why despite a simple-enough migration path from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream 8, it wouldn’t work for admins who use CentOS for its decade-long support.
Irked by the move, CloudLinux –a major server OS vendor – soon announced a 1:1 binary compatible RHEL fork to fill the void. CloudLinux makes a popular CentOSbased OS for servers and counts the likes of Liquid Web, 1&1, and Dell as customers. In addition to having the technical chops to create the distro, CloudLinux also backed the new Linux distro with a financial commitment of a million dollars a year.