2020 has been a fateful year for CentOS , one of the most widely used professional Linux. This Linux was, broadly speaking, a free version of Red Hat as it was based directly on it. However, the company made the decision to do away with it and move to a “Rolling Release” model, which in other words means being the Red Hat Enterprise Linux guinea pig, RHEL. This was not liked by the users or the community. Luckily, there are already several projects looking to replace the original CentOS and continue to bring it to life in a new project. And one of the most advanced that we can find is the new AlmaLinux .
AlmaLinux is a new open source distribution developed by CloudLinux developers. This distro aims to replace CentOS and offer users a distro, as faithful as possible to the original, that allows us to continue using a fork of RHEL without having to go through the Red Hat hoop and assume its experiments via Rolling Release .
What AlmaLinux brings to the community
Its makers promise that this distribution will always be free and open source. It will be developed and maintained initially by them, but will always be controlled by the community. The developers promise that AlmaLinux will be a 1: 1 copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux , just like CentOS was. There will be no experiments, no own packages or other changes. It will follow the development cycle of the Red Hat distro and will be updated as new updates arrive.
The problem many users encounter is that switching distributions takes time for backups, installations, and configurations. These developers say that going from CentOS to AlmaLinux is a very quick and easy process. Almost instantaneous. With a single command they can migrate all their systems to this new distro, without stops, without new software and or complex configurations.
For now, these developers guarantee us support until 2029, although they intend to continue working on this distro as long as Red Hat continues working on theirs.
to download
At the moment, AlmaLinux is in the development phase , that is, it is not finished yet. But users who want to have a first contact with him will be able to do so thanks to the first beta that has just seen the light of day. Of course, always in a virtual machine, for now.
This Beta 1 can be downloaded completely free of charge from the developers’ website . We can find an exclusively bootable disk and then two system images: one complete and one minimal. Both for 64 bits, so we will not be able to install this system on a 32-bit PC.
Of course, first of all we want to make it clear that Red Hat, CentOS or AlmaLinux are not distributions for all users . These are very stable and excellent performing distros, but intended for advanced users and businesses. If we do not have knowledge of Linux, before trying this new distro we recommend you start with the simplest distros, such as Ubuntu or Mint, to become familiar with Linux.