The European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN, Switzerland) and the Enrico Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab, USA), who at one time developed the Scientific Linux distribution, but then switched to using CentOS, announced the choice of AlmaLinux as a regular distribution to accompany experiments. The decision was made due to a change in Red Hat's policy regarding maintenance of CentOS and the premature phasing out of support for the CentOS 8 branch, the release of updates for which was discontinued at the end of 2021, and not in 2029, as users expected.
It is noted that during testing, the AlmaLinux distribution showed excellent compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other assemblies. Among the advantages also called the rapid release of updates, a long period of support, the possibility of community participation in development, expanded support for hardware architectures and the provision of metadata about vulnerabilities that are fixed. Systems already deployed at CERN and Fermilab based on Scientific Linux 7 and CentOS 7 will continue to be supported until the end of the life cycle of these distributions in June 2024. CERN and Fermilab will also continue to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for some of their services and projects.
The AlmaLinux distribution is founded by CloudLinux, which has ten years of experience in creating builds based on RHEL source packages, a ready-made infrastructure and a large staff of developers and maintainers. CloudLinux provided resources for the development of AlmaLinux and moved the project under the wing of a separate non-profit organization AlmaLinux OS Foundation for development in a neutral platform with community participation. Project management uses a model similar to Fedora's work organization. The distribution develops in accordance with the principles of the classic CentOS, is formed through the rebuilding of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux package base and retains full binary compatibility with RHEL. The product is free for all categories of users, and all developments of AlmaLinux are published under free licenses.
In addition to AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux (developed by the community under the guidance of the founder of CentOS), VzLinux (prepared by Virtuozzo), Oracle Linux, SUSE Liberty Linux and EuroLinux are also positioned as alternatives to the classic CentOS. In addition, Red Hat has made RHEL available free of charge to open source organizations and individual developer environments of up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru