The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Switzerland) and the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) initially developed the Scientific Linux distribution but later switched to using CentOS. They announced the selection of AlmaLinux as the standard distribution to support their experiments. This decision was made due to changes in Red Hat's policy regarding CentOS support and the premature termination of CentOS 8 support, which was ended in late 2021 instead of in 2029 as users expected.
It is noted that during testing, AlmaLinux showed excellent compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other distributions. Advantages also include timely updates, long-term support, community involvement in development, extended hardware architecture support, and the provision of metadata on vulnerabilities addressed. Existing systems at CERN and Fermilab based on Scientific Linux 7 and CentOS 7 will continue to be supported until the end of their life cycle in June 2024. CERN and Fermilab will also continue using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in some of their services and projects.
AlmaLinux distribution is based on CloudLinux, which has a decade of experience building RHEL-based distributions, a ready-made infrastructure, and a large team of developers and maintainers. CloudLinux provided resources for the development of AlmaLinux and transferred the project to a separate non-profit organization, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, for development in a neutral environment with community involvement. The project is managed using a model similar to the organization of work in Fedora. The distribution evolves according to the principles of classic CentOS, is created through the rebuilding of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux package base, and maintains full binary compatibility with RHEL. The product is free for all user categories, and all developments of AlmaLinux are published under open licenses.
In addition to AlmaLinux, alternatives to traditional CentOS include Rocky Linux (developed by a community led by the founder of CentOS), VzLinux (prepared by Virtuozzo), Oracle Linux, SUSE Liberty Linux, and EuroLinux. Furthermore, Red Hat has provided the opportunity for free use of RHEL in organizations that develop open source software and in individual developer environments with up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru
