What is AlmaLinux, and what’s it best for?

If you’ve just spun up a VPS and picked AlmaLinux as the operating system, you might be wondering what you’ve actually got. Here’s the short version: it’s a free, open-source Linux distribution built to be compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and it’s one of the most common choices for unmanaged production servers today.

A quick history

AlmaLinux exists because of a decision Red Hat made in December 2020. At the time, CentOS was the standard free, downstream rebuild of RHEL – you got all the stability of Red Hat’s enterprise operating system without the subscription cost. Red Hat announced it was ending that model and shifting CentOS upstream, into a rolling-release project called CentOS Stream, which tracks ahead of RHEL rather than mirroring it.

That left a gap for anyone who wanted a genuinely free, stable, RHEL-compatible server OS. CloudLinux, a company that had already been building RHEL-based distributions for years, stepped in and founded AlmaLinux. The first stable release, AlmaLinux 8.3, shipped in March 2021.

Who maintains it

AlmaLinux isn’t a CloudLinux product – it’s governed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, a non-profit organisation set up specifically to steward the project on behalf of the community. CloudLinux seeded the Foundation and has committed significant annual funding and engineering time to it, but decisions about the project are made through the Foundation’s open governance structure, not by a single vendor. That matters for a server OS: it reduces the risk of the project being discontinued or redirected because one company’s priorities changed.

How compatible is it with RHEL, really?

For AlmaLinux 8 and early AlmaLinux 9 releases (up to 9.2), the answer is straightforward: these are 1:1 binary-compatible rebuilds of RHEL, built from the same source code Red Hat publishes. Software, kernel modules, and packages built for RHEL run on the matching AlmaLinux release without modification.

That changed with AlmaLinux 9.3, released November 2023. After Red Hat changed how it distributes RHEL source code earlier that year, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation moved from a strict bug-for-bug clone approach to targeting ABI (application binary interface) compatibility with RHEL instead – a shift that has carried through AlmaLinux 10 as well. In practice this still means AlmaLinux runs the same binaries and behaves the same way as RHEL for almost everyone – the difference is mostly about how AlmaLinux is built upstream, not something you’ll notice as an end user managing a server.

Why choose it for a VPS

• It’s free. No subscription, no per-server licensing, no support contract required to use it in production.
• It’s the enterprise standard. RHEL and its rebuilds are the default choice for a huge share of commercial Linux software – control panels, backup tools, monitoring agents, and hosting platforms are built and tested against it first.
• Long support lifecycle. Each major version gets roughly ten years of support in total: about five years of active updates followed by security-only updates for the remainder. You’re not forced through disruptive major upgrades every year or two.
• Conservative, stable package versions. AlmaLinux favours stability over having the newest software – packages get backported security fixes rather than being bumped to the latest upstream version. That’s a good trade-off for a production server.

Typical use cases

AlmaLinux is a particularly common choice for:

• Control panel hosting – cPanel and Plesk both officially support and recommend AlmaLinux, and most VPS “cPanel-ready” images are built on it.
• General-purpose production servers – web servers, application servers, databases, and mail servers where you want something you can set up once and not have to fight with for years.
• Anyone previously running CentOS – the package manager, service manager, and general layout of the filesystem will feel immediately familiar.

If you’re setting up a fresh AlmaLinux VPS, our initial server setup checklist covers the first things worth doing before you deploy anything to it.