AlmaLinux in 2026

Every year, around FOSDEM, the AlmaLinux SIG leaders, ALESCo members, and board members are invited to attend the AlmaLinux Leadership Summit. The goal of the summit is to get everyone in a room to have discussions around the major problems we’re facing, ensure that what we’re doing in the year to come is focused on our goals, work out any friction between SIGs, and make sure that everyone in leadership is united around what we want to accomplish. This year we had one of our most productive conversations yet, and I’m excited to share some of those goals with you here.

A little context first

The high-level theme for us this year is to refocus on solving problems that our community has. It is very easy for us, as nerds, to get excited about the shiny things in front of us — but those aren’t necessarily what our community needs. As an all-volunteer organization, it’s important that we keep ourselves focused on what our community needs first, and what we find exciting secondarily. That said, our favorite goals — and the ones most likely to get the attention they deserve — are the ones where our excitement and our community’s needs align.

Goals we share with every open source project

As we continue to see industries and communities galvanize around their use of AlmaLinux, we will continue to see more SIGs launched. (Did you know that it’s actually quite easy to start a SIG in AlmaLinux? The process is laid out on our wiki.)

But more SIGs means we have to be intentional about how we grow and support our community. Some of the goals below are ones you’ll recognize from any healthy open source project:

• Streamlining onboarding for new contributors — making it easier for people to show up and immediately find somewhere useful to contribute
• More transparency — communicating better and more consistently about what we’re doing and why
• Balancing transparency and security — being as open as possible without compromising our workflows
• More diversity in active contributors — finding where we’re missing opportunities to engage with underrepresented communities of users
• Meeting users where they are — figuring out where our users are spending their time and showing up there
• Increased testing — ensuring everything we ship (including all of the new things our SIGs will make) is validated before it reaches users
• More sponsor and member engagement — bringing in more sponsor members and engaging with our existing ones in a more consistent and collaborative way
• Lowering the bar for suggestions — making it easier for contributors and collaborators to raise ideas in a way that feels comfortable
• Embracing efficiency — adopting technologies and workflows that help our all-volunteer community get more done
• Building relationships with other open source projects — ensuring good collaboration with the software our users care about most
• Expanding language support for our documentation — our website is a good example of the different languages our community engages in, but that’s not yet reflected in our videos and documentation

The SIG goals

Each SIG leader who attended the summit was asked to provide a list of goals they’d like to see accomplished in their SIG this year. As we went through those goals, we also discussed where they overlapped and how we could support each other in getting them done.

Build SIG

• Get new errata formats contributed upstream
• Move the lingering parts of the build system public
• Further automate building ISO images

Atomic SIG

• Figure out who is using the Atomic images and how to better support those users

Certification SIG

• Make it easier for hardware vendors to submit certification information
• Define a process for software vendor submissions
• Get the Certification Suite runtime down to under 1 hour on average

Core SIG

• Add dependency testing across entire repos (exploring dnf repoclosure and alternatives)
• Extend testing coverage for Power and IBM Z architectures
• Retire the private Jenkins instance (currently used for ISO builds with Power/IBM Z constraints) — potentially migrate to GitHub Actions

Media & Entertainment SIG

• Release an M&E ISO using AlmaLinux 10 with KDE Plasma desktop
• Maybe pull in RPMFusion packages (still TBD)
• Build a “Works on AlmaLinux” page for M&E software providers
• Build a GUI for installing M&E apps
• Create videos and how-tos to help people get started with AlmaLinux in the M&E space

Migration SIG

• Decide whether to add support for migrating AlmaLinux 9 to 10 on x86_64_v2.

Marketing SIG

• Survey users to find out which AlmaLinux images are being used and where
• Work with partners to build workshops — “we want to help people who use your software/hardware with AlmaLinux to do it better”
• Quarterly SIG blog posts — either independent posts or a SIG roundup covering what each SIG is working on and what they’re looking for

Community (all SIG leaders in general)

• Improve community engagement — we need to be better about asking our community when we need help
• Define SIG leader position expectations a bit more completely
• Set up auto-replies to PRs so contributors know what to expect
• Set up regular (annual?) reviews of all SIGs

Executive & Foundation

These are mostly goals that I have for myself this year, but they deserve to be tracked somewhere!

• Improve our sponsor curation and engagements
• Update and redistribute our Code of Conduct to ensure it reflects who we are today and how we want to operate going forward

Get involved

That is a massive list of goals, and iit isn’t even the full list of SIGs! We are already working on these goals, but we need your help. If you find something here that excites you, find the relevant SIG leader on Mattermost or via email and let them know. They would love to have every person with any interest show up in whatever capacity they can.

We also have two AlmaLinux Days coming up this year where you can meet the people behind these goals in person. AlmaLinux Day: Germany is happening on March 26th at CloudFest in Rust, Germany, and AlmaLinux Day: Los Angeles is happening on July 18th alongside SIGGRAPH. Come say hi!

If your company depends on AlmaLinux — whether you’re running it in production, shipping it to customers, or building products on top of it — becoming a sponsor member is one of the most direct ways to ensure the project stays healthy and keeps moving forward. Sponsor members get a seat at the table: visibility into the foundation’s direction, recognition across our platforms, and direct input into the priorities that affect your infrastructure. The goals above represent real work that benefits from real investment, and every sponsor member makes it easier for us to do more of it. If that sounds like a fit, reach out — I’d love to talk.