Table of contents of the article:
AlmaLinux is officially available. For those who don't know, AlmaLinux is a new fork of RHEL , produced by the CloudLinux team . Developed in close collaboration with the community, this new GNU/Linux distribution aims to fill the void left by Red Hat with the discontinuation of the CentOS project.
CloudLinux was founded in 2009 to provide a customized clone of RHEL/CentOS, ready to be installed on servers. The company's flagship product is the CloudLinux operating system, a fork that has been active for over ten years. More than 4.000 companies, including Dell, Liquid Web, and 1&1, rely on the CloudLinux operating system, which has a proven track record of building and maintaining a fork of RHEL.
The AlmaLinux project, originally called Lenix , was launched shortly after Red Hat announced it was abandoning CentOS in favor of CentOS Stream. Like CentOS, AlmaLinux is a community-based build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The AlmaLinux operating system is an opportunity for us to channel our RHEL experience towards a Linux distribution that serves a wider community […] The AlmaLinux operating system will always be free and open source.
these are the words of CloudLinux.
The underlying problem, Redhat's proprietary IBM policy.
As we anticipated in this article some time ago, IBM completes its historic $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat Linux after IBM's purchase of Red Hat, the entire community has begun to worry about the future of Red Hat-derived distributions such as Fedora and CentOS and are worried that IBM is taking advantage of their position and business policies.
Many of these concerns are related to IBM's aggressive business practices. For example, IBM has a history of suing companies that use IBM patents without paying royalties. They also have a history of charging exorbitant fees for their patents or refusing to sell products for which they own the patents. Furthermore, IBM is known to sue other companies for patent infringement, regardless of any actual wrongdoing on their part. This can be seen in the case where the United States Department of Justice (USDOJ) dismissed an antitrust lawsuit filed against Google by Oracle. These concerns are valid, as it is entirely possible that future versions of Red Hat and its derivatives could be modified in ways that further harm the proprietary software community and/or create roadblocks for users seeking to exercise their right to modify and share software as set forth in the GPLv2 license. Some have even speculated that this is precisely why IBM purchased Red Hat in the first place: to undermine its main competitor, CentOS.
The change of RedHat and the consequent death of CentOS.
Red Hat's decision was a death sentence for CentOS. As one of the most widely used Linux distributions, many people, including myself, warned that this change would spell the end for CentOS. CentOS Stream's main problem is that it lacks durable distributions with a ten-year end-of-life compatible with RHEL, and it also has too much new software that isn't completely stable, as was the case with Red Hat RHEL. This is why I've always argued that CentOS should remain what it is now: a distribution based on RHEL releases every six months, but more stable and compatible. This way, users can update their systems more frequently than every two years, while still being able to update whenever they need using the same RHEL repositories.
CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer is one of the many community members who are not happy with Red Hat's decision to shut down CentOS Linux. Prior to CentOS, Kurtzer ran a Red Hat rebuild project called Chaos Linux. Kurtzer's work merged with that of Rocky McGough and Lance Davis to form the CentOS Project.
Comparison between Centos Linux and CentOS Stream
There seems to be a lot of confusion between CentOS Linux and CentOS Stream. They are both rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but they are different entities: The CentOS Linux versions are based on the currently released RHEL version. They contain large batches of updates from the previous release, containing all security and bug fixes, and also include some new package versions. Product changes made by Red Hat after a CentOS Linux release has been branched will not be included in that release. CentOS Stream releases are based on the content that is planned for future releases of RHEL. They may include several small batches of updates between minor releases. Product changes made by Red Hat after a CentOS Stream release has been branched may be included in subsequent streams.
AlmaLinux as a replacement for CentOS.
AlmaLinux was announced in early 2019, but the company behind it has only recently begun to actively promote it. This is partly because the old CentOS had been virtually abandoned by its developers. The 1:1 fork of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is designed to fill the gaps. One of the biggest complaints about CentOS was that it wasn't a fully supported and certified solution. This certainly can't be said of AlmaLinux, which will receive regular updates from CloudLinux and have its ISO images hosted on the official website. It's also worth noting that this distribution comes with long-term support and will be updated according to the strictest security guidelines.
There was a need for a stable downstream version of RHEL. Red Hat has other plans for CentOS and so I'm happy that a worthy successor has joined in to fill the gap left by the latter.
These are the words of Simon Phipps , president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI).
AlmaLinux is probably the best replacement for CentOS today .
Migration from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux
In addition to the stable release, there is also a script written in Bash called “ almalinux-deploy.sh ” available on the AlmaLinux GitHub account , which allows you to switch from your CentOS distribution to AlmaLinux without having to reinstall the distribution from scratch.
