It’s taken months for this post to get finalized, but it’s because 2024 was another big year for us! We created a slew of great new things, overcame incredible challenges, and met and supported even more community members. I tried hard to keep this summary of 2024’s work short, but it turns out you just can’t even begin to highlight all of the impact of this vast and active community without it being long-winded.
First: thank you
Before I get to the list of things the AlmaLinux community has accomplished this year, I want to share my gratitude.
The support of our community ensures we continue to meet our goal of being the most stable, secure, and easy-to-engage-with enterprise Linux distribution. Whether it’s funding support, helping spread the word, staffing booths at events, improving the translations on our website, helping each other on the forums or in chat, or just sporting an AlmaLinux pin, everything you do helps, and I can’t thank you enough.
New versions of AlmaLinux OS and more platforms to run it on!
As our primary objective, continuing to provide stable, secure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux-compatible releases of AlmaLinux is our top priority. In 2024 we released AlmaLinux 9.4 and AlmaLinux 9.5, and the last minor version of 8 - AlmaLinux 8.10. We have easily continued to meet the expectations of AlmaLinux users by releasing our new version of AlmaLinux less than a week after RHEL.
In case you were curious, there are two reasons we consistently release 6 days after RHEL. First: with our new build process, we have more work and testing to do before we are ready to release AlmaLinux to you. That work used to be complete in just over a day, but now it takes about 2 days. With new minor versions of RHEL typically being released on a Tuesday, we’re typically ready to release late in the day on Thursday, but we care about our community too much to release on a Friday. :D
We also announced our brand new AlmaLinux OS Kitten, which is a development-focused version of AlmaLinux OS, and currently serves as the stable preview of AlmaLinux OS 10.
While not many compared to the 1.4M+ of AlmaLinux OS 8 and 9, we already have a few thousand devices checking in with our public mirrorlist that are running AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10! For a development branch, that’s pretty cool. It also serves as the upstream for a couple of projects, and is already helping projects based on AlmaLinux to get ready for AlmaLinux OS 10 - exactly what we were hoping for!
As always, we have our amazing Core, Infra, and Build SIGs to thank for these speedy releases! They are hyper-focused on solving the needs of our user community - and getting our updates out the door fast is a bit of an obsession for them.
Speaking of community needs - your feedback helps make these releases successful! You can help by testing beta releases as they come out, reporting bugs, and answering comments and questions on the forums or in our chat.
This year we also added support for Raspberry Pi 5’s, and started working with our upstream friends in Fedora and CentOS to prepare for the incoming RISC-V support!
Continuing to embrace our freedom
When we were surprised by Red Hat’s change in 2023, we were given a new freedom that we have been very happy to take advantage of. Due to the sudden nature of that change, though, the discussions around where to deviate from RHEL and what changes we might want to make were taking place in a relatively closed way.
To fix that, we established the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee, or ALESCo! In short, ALESCo is a group of engineers heavily involved in using and developing AlmaLinux, formed into a committee that has been generally guiding the technical progression and growth of AlmaLinux as an operating system. It acts as a central collaboration point for the AlmaLinux SIGs and community in general, and is the driving force behind any deviations that AlmaLinux takes from our upstreams while ensuring we maintain full compatibility with RHEL.
For example, when made aware of CVEs like CVE-2024-6387 (regreSSHion) and CVE-2024-6409, ALESCo made the decision to build the update and push the package to production on our own, without waiting for a CentOS Stream/RHEL update.
We’re looking forward to ALESCo continuing to guide the OS in a very public way, furthering our goal of providing full transparency regarding the technical decisions surrounding AlmaLinux.
ELevate gets 3 more OSes and even more flexibility
In April of 2024 we expanded ELevate to support upgrading devices running CentOS 6 get to a supported operating system (which got used in production almost immediately). We also added support for upgrading from Scientific Linux 7 and CentOS Stream 8.
One of the common pain points was that ELevate had such a limited number of repos that it could support during the upgrade, and we expanded that, too! You can see the full list of supported repos on our wiki, and even contribute support for additional repos to ELevate yourself!
Growth in the AlmaLinux community
In 2024 we expanded the AlmaLinux community in every way you can imagine! We announced two new SIGs: the HPC and AI SIG as well as the Certification SIG! We expanded the number of Sponsor members by 9, bringing us to a total of 34. We expanded the number of individual backers on GitHub and Open Collective to over 40. We expanded the number of mirrors in our global mirror system to over 450.
One of the easiest ways we’ve seen the evidence of our growth is in the exponential growth of devices reaching out to the mirror system for updates. While this number only shows a fraction of the devices running AlmaLinux (because not everyone uses the public update system) it is a good representation of the continued expansion of our global community.
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation saw membership continue to expand, and we welcomed even more sponsor members to the foundation. By December we had brought our total corporate backers up to 34.
We were honored to welcome CloudLinux, Tuxcare, Cybertrust Japan, black.host, procomputers.com, Hivelocity, Mattermost, Codenotary, ATIX AG (orcharhino), World4You Internet Services (an IONOS Group brand), KnownHost, WebPros, IPInfo, AWS, Microsoft Azure, arm, Equinix, OSU OSL, algolia, and Sine Nomine as returning sponsor members.
We’re so grateful to have CERN, Megware, Virtuozzo, StorPool Storage AD, Fastly, Fsas Technologies (a Fujitsu company), SIE LADÓN, Litmus information Systems, and Meta Platforms all join as new sponsor members in 2024!
AlmaLinux Days - Germany and Tokyo!
In 2023, we hosted the very first AlmaLinux Day in Tokyo, and in 2024 we were able to host a second AlmaLinux Day: Tokyo as well as AlmaLinux Day: Germany! With 30+ speakers and over 400 attendees across those two events, we were able to reach a whole new audience and spread the word about AlmaLinux in a whole new way. With those events under our belt, we are definitely planning to continue to reach our audience in wholly new and unique ways!
The videos for AlmaLinux Day: Germany are on Youtube, and the videos from AlmaLinux Day: Tokyo should be up soon!
Encouraging help in the greater open source community
With our ever-growing community and the reach of AlmaLinux, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we’re engaging with the greater open source world. Some are relatively small ways - like helping with the Distros room at FOSDEM and staffing the Valkey booth at OpenSource Summit EU.
Some are bigger or more far-reaching ways - like submitting bug fixes and feature updates to projects that we use, or expanding the number of packages available in the enterprise Linux ecosystem by encouraging those who ask for their software to be packaged for AlmaLinux to, instead, become package maintainers for EPEL.
These intangible ways that we are committed to improving the whole ecosystem are what you encounter if you come to the AlmaLinux chat.
2025 and Beyond
It’s been another busy year, but we’re so grateful to every member of our AlmaLinux community! You are the reason that we exist, and I am continually amazed by the people all working together toward our common goals.
While a bunch of us were at FOSDEM earlier this year, we spent a day talking about the things that are impacting AlmaLinux most as we enter our 5th year. All of that planning and discussion will be shared in another post sometime soon. Keep an eye out to see what we’re up to next!
If you want to stay up-to-date, subscribe/follow/join/etc on our forum, Reddit, X, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. We also launched a newsletter this year, which you can subscribe to on LinkedIn or via email on our mailing list.
There are also lots of opportunities and ways to get (more) involved with AlmaLinux, so if that’s interesting to you, check out this blog post for more information!
