As AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux vie for dominance in the free RHEL replacement space that was abandoned by CentOS Linux, Alma appears to be making deeper inroads on several fronts.
This was a big deal. As a feature-for-feature downstream clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, many enterprises depended on the distro as a way of running RHEL without having to pay a Red Hat tax, which is probably why Red Hat wanted to see it go.
While several existing Linux distros immediately raised their hands to offer themselves as potential CentOS replacements (most notably Oracle Linux, already a near clone of RHEL), two impressive new distro projects surfaced to fill the void and now dominate the market that CentOS left behind.
Both of these Linux distributions were announced within hours of each other, soon after Red Hat made its announcement. Rocky Linux was announced first, and got the lion’s share of the initial attention from the press because its founder, Gregory Kurtzer, founder and CEO of CIQ, has a complicated connection with CentOS’s genesis, with many seeing him as the logical choice to raise a new CentOS out of the ashes old.
A short time later, the distro that eventually became known as AlmaLinux after a lengthy naming process, was announced by Igor Seletskiy, CEO of CloudLinux, a hardened CentOS-based commercial distribution designed primarily for web hosting companies. With CentOS on the way out, Seletskiy evidently figured he’d have to find another way of bringing RHEL parity to CloudLinux.
A little over a year later, both distros are up and running, both are seeing large numbers of installs by large enterprises and smaller users alike, both have found a degree of funding, and both have seen several successfu
