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On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that development of CentOS Linux, a free-of-cost downstream fork of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), would be discontinued and its official support would be cut short to focus on CentOS Stream, a rolling release officially used by Red Hat to preview what is intended for inclusion in updates to RHEL.
In response, CloudLinux – which maintains its own commercial Linux distribution, CloudLinux OS – created AlmaLinux to provide a community-supported spiritual successor to CentOS Linux, aiming for binary-compatibility with the current version of RHEL. A beta version of AlmaLinux was first released on February 1, 2021, and the first stable release of AlmaLinux was published on March 30, 2021. AlmaLinux 8.x will be supported until 2029. On March 30, 2021, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation was created to take over AlmaLinux development and governance from CloudLinux, which has promised $1 million in annual funding to the project.
The name of the distribution comes from the Spanish word "alma", meaning "soul", chosen to be an homage to the Linux community.
8.3 Purple Manul x86-64
8.4 Electric Cheetah x86-64, ARM64
8.5 Arctic Sphynx x86-64, ARM64, PowerPC
