2025 was another year of growth and excitement for AlmaLinux. Here’s a look back at what we achieved, all thanks to our amazing community! Whether you’ve been involved from the start, just recently joined us, or have yet to start contributing, we’d like to thank you for being a part of this community.
AlmaLinux OS versions and AlmaLinux OS Kitten Updates
Our main goal is to provide stable, secure, Red Hat Enterprise Linux-compatible releases of AlmaLinux OS. In 2025, we released AlmaLinux OS 9.6, 10.0, 9.7, and 10.1.
With these releases, we not only continue to meet the expectations of AlmaLinux users by releasing our versions around a week after RHEL, we also expanded the ways in which AlmaLinux can be used by adding Btrfs support.
In addition, we’ve also continuously updated AlmaLinux OS Kitten, which is our development-focused distribution of AlmaLinux OS that we announced back in October of 2024. It was the first place you saw AlmaLinux OS 10, and the first place you saw Btrfs support. If you want to learn more about Kitten, take a look at the docs in the Wiki!
ALESCo in 2025
Transparency is a big part of any open source project, and ALESCo plays a key role in our transparency as an OS. In case you are unfamiliar, ALESCo is a group of engineers heavily involved in using and developing AlmaLinux, formed into a committee that has been generally guiding the technical progression and growth of AlmaLinux as an operating system. It acts as a central collaboration point for the AlmaLinux SIGs and community in general, and is the driving force behind any deviations that AlmaLinux takes from our upstreams while ensuring we maintain full compatibility with RHEL.
In 2025, ALESCo was involved in a number of decisions that shaped AlmaLinux OS:
x86_64_v2 support for AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 and AlmaLinux OS 10
ALESCo will continue to guide the OS in a very public way, furthering our goal of providing full transparency regarding the technical decisions surrounding AlmaLinux. If you’d like to get involved, join the Mattermost channel, or join us for a meeting! They’re all open to the public.
ELevate in 2025
If you don’t know, the ELevate project is an initiative to support upgrades between major versions of RHEL-derivatives. You can learn more about it here on our Wiki.
As of 2025, you can now ELevate to EL 10. New paths include:
AlmaLinux OS 9 to AlmaLinux OS 10.0
AlmaLinux OS 9 to AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10
CentOS Stream 9 to CentOS Stream 10
We also had a major ELevate update in December of 2025: ELevate is now supported in upstream LEAPP! That significantly reduces the amount of work that we have to maintain in ELevate.
AlmaLinux and CentOS Stream will be supported upgrade paths in ELevate for the long-term, and will be maintained by members of the ELevate project in upstream LEAPP. We would love to see contributions from any projects, including operating systems (to add upgrade support), or software providers (to add repo support) in ELevate. Operating systems would need to have that support added both to the upstream leapp-repository, and to ELevate.
We take feedback in the form of issues and pull requests on our own leapp-repository repo, or as part of a discussion in the ~Migration channel in Mattermost, and can’t wait to hear from you!
2025 Events
In 2025, we hosted the first AlmaLinux Day: Vancouver, which took place adjacent to SIGGRAPH! We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, but we couldn’t have pulled it off without our amazing volunteers who helped to organize it, as well as all of our wonderful speakers.
If you missed it (or if you’d just like to relive it), the sessions are available to watch on YouTube.
We also attended a lot of community events over the course of the year, and it was great to connect with old and new friends, in addition to community members - anyone who wanted to learn more about AlmaLinux!
We’re looking forward to another year filled with events, including some more AlmaLinux Day events, so keep your eyes peeled!
Growth in the AlmaLinux Community
We’re grateful to have such an amazing community. Here’s a little bit more about them!
AlmaSponsors
Our AlmaSponsors invest in forever-free, community-owned enterprise Linux. For an independent open source project, maintaining funding through a variety of sponsor members is key to our ability to remain impartial, and is key to our long-term goal of achieving 501(c)(3) status. We remain grateful to our entire community for their support, and are especially grateful for the sponsor members who support the project with funds or resources that are critical to helping us keep up with our explosive growth.
Platinum: Cybertrust, CloudLinux, TuxCare
Gold: Hivelocity, KnownHost, Meta, IPinfo, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, OSU Open Source Lab, Plesk, Arista, Equinix
Silver: Hawk Host, CERN, BlackHost, Mattermost, Codenotary, world4you Internet Services GmbH, StorPool Storage, Fastly, AMD, SIE | Sistemas Informáticos Europeos, Litmus Information Systems LLP, Algolia, Arm
Ruby: rackSPEED GmbH
If you’re interested in sponsoring AlmaLinux, learn more here!
AlmaHelpers
Behind every release and support thread are real people making AlmaLinux what it is!
Our AlmaHelpers are the heartbeat of community-owned Linux, from the code committers, documentation writers, board members, individual contributors, and beyond.
Thank you for your contributions!
One way we are seeing more people show up to help is in the new SIGs formed in 2025, including the Media & Entertainment SIG and the Atomic SIG.
If you’d like to get involved, take a look at the Contribute page to get inspired, and then join us in Mattermost!
AlmaMembers
Community-owned means something real when you have members who show up.
To the individual members of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, thank you for believing in a future where enterprise Linux is truly owned by its community!
Individual membership is free, and open to anyone who touches the AlmaLinux project in nearly any way. If you’d like to become a member, learn more here!
AlmaMirrors
Fast, reliable downloads don’t happen by magic. They happen because people host mirrors!
To our AlmaMirrors around the world: thank you for keeping AlmaLinux accessible and speedy for everyone, everywhere! You’re the backbone of global distribution!
A special thanks to our Rsync mirror hosts and our technology sponsors - you help more than we can say: KnownHost, fastly, anywair, ziplyfiber, Hivelocity, and ipinfo.io
If you’d like to create a public AlmaLinux mirror, learn more here! You can also become an AlmaLinux mirror member.
AlmaFriends
The strength of open source is in its ecosystem. 💪
To our AlmaFriends (including adjacent projects like CentOS and Fedora, community allies, and everyone who champions AlmaLinux) thank you for championing collaboration over competition.
We also like to thank all of the open source projects that WE use to make AlmaLinux the success it is.
General: Mattermost, Hugo, VuePress, Discourse, Matrix/Synapse, Mastodon, Matomo
Infrastructure: Ansible, Caddy, Django, FreeIPA, Gitea, Grafana, Headscale, iptables/nftables, Keycloak, Kerberos/krb5, Mailman, MantisBT, MariaDB, Matterbridge, Noggin, PostgreSQL, 389ds, Rsyslog, Sentry, Tailscale, TimescaleDB, Unbound, Valkey, Vaultwarden, Zabbix
Languages & Frameworks: PHP, Python, Go, Rust, Celery, Dramatiq, FastAPI, pytest, Quasar, SQLAlchemy
Build & DevOps: curl, Docker, Jenkins, Nginx, OpenSSH, Pulp, Pulumi, RabbitMQ, Rsync
Containers & Desktop: Bootc, Flatpak, GNOME, Image Builder/Bootc-image-builder, KDE Plasma, Podman, Sigstore/Cosign
Media & Creative: Blender, GIMP, Krita
Testing: Phoronix Test Suite
Together we’re building a better future for enterprise Linux!
Continued Growth
It’s thanks to all of these members of the AlmaLinux community that we’re able to keep AlmaLinux growing, which we can see by looking at the devices reaching out to the mirror system for updates. While this number only shows a fraction of the devices running AlmaLinux (because not everyone uses the public update system) it is one more good representation of the continued expansion of our global community.
Encouraging Help in the Greater Open Source Community
With our ever-growing community and the reach of AlmaLinux, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we’re engaging with the greater open source world. Some are relatively small ways - like attending events or responding to community questions in the forums.
Some are bigger or more far-reaching ways, like submitting bug fixes and feature updates to projects that we use, or expanding the number of packages available in the enterprise Linux ecosystem by encouraging those who ask for their software to be packaged for AlmaLinux to, instead, become package maintainers for EPEL.
These intangible ways that we are committed to improving the whole ecosystem are what you encounter if you come to the AlmaLinux chat.
2026 and Beyond
Through all the growth and excitement in 2025, our community continues to show up and show out! We’d like to once again thank everyone who has contributed to AlmaLinux’s journey, and we’re looking forward to another exciting year for AlmaLinux in 2026.
If you want to stay up-to-date, subscribe/follow/join/etc on our forum, Reddit, X, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. We also launched a newsletter this year, which you can subscribe to on LinkedIn or via email on our mailing list.
There are also lots of opportunities and ways to get (more) involved with AlmaLinux, so if that’s interesting to you, check out this page for more information!
