AlmaLinux OS 8.8 has been officially released, codenamed "Sapphire Caracal".
AlmaLinux is an open source, community-driven project compiled from the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). AlmaLinux is fully binary compatible with RHEL 8 from the creators of the CloudLinux OS. The AlmaLinux team promises to provide the AlmaLinux operating system for free forever, and the project will be permanently open source without any restrictions and fees, and will be supported until 2029.
In 2020, Red Hat decided to stop using CentOS Linux as an independent distribution, and instead launched a rolling update distribution, CentOS Stream, as an upstream beta version of the enterprise distribution RHEL. The community immediately launched several projects to replace CentOS, most notably two projects: Rocky Linux, sponsored by the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation; and AlmaLinux, sponsored by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation.
The release announcement reads that AlmaLinux 8.8 brings enhancements and new features to provide a more stable and secure open hybrid cloud infrastructure to help deliver workloads, applications and services for multiple environments faster and easier .
This release also includes security updates such as the realmd system role, OpenSCAP, and other security-related updates allowing easy management of security and compliance.
Improvements to the application stream include compiler, runtime language, database, and web server updates. AlmaLinux 8.8 brings an updated module stream for Python 3.11, PostgreSQL 15, Nginx 1.22, upgraded tools such as Valgrind 3.9, GCC 12 is now available, the Rust 1.68 toolchain is now available, and there are some security updates.
This release also continues to make system automation and standardization easier with an enhanced web console and new system roles. As for containers, new features make it easier to develop and manage containerized deployments.
AlmaLinux 8.8 now supports x86_64, AArch64, PPC64LE and s390x architectures, see the download link for details .