AlmaLinux rolls out 9.8 and 10.2 side by side, pairing new compiler and language stacks with security fixes and an ALESCo‑approved kernel backport that arrives ahead of the RHEL upstream.
If AlmaLinux is looking for bragging rights, it’s got them. On Tuesday it announced that it pushed versions 9.8 and 10.2 of its eponymous Linux distribution out the door on a single day. This has the AlmaLinux folks figuratively polishing their fingernails on their chests — and rightfully so. In the press release, it calls the dual release a “significant advancement,” and assures users that the feat was accomplished without compromising reliability, performance, or enterprise readiness.
“This dual release demonstrates how much the AlmaLinux community and engineering ecosystem have accomplished in a relatively short period of time,” Andrew Lukoshko, AlmaLinux’s lead architect and chair of the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee, said in a statement. “Delivering two stable enterprise-ready releases simultaneously while continuing to introduce meaningful upstream enhancements, expanded hardware support, and rapid security response capabilities underscores AlmaLinux’s commitment to giving users a dependable and forward-looking enterprise Linux platform.”
The five-year-old distro — a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux — has previously earned bragging rights for being the first of the RHEL clones to release a version of AlmaLinux on the same day as a corresponding RHEL release, a feat it’s repeated on several occasions since.
I’d be bragging too if I were capable of that.
AlmaLinux OS 9.8
For additional bragging rights, AlmaLinux 9.8 ships an ALESCo-approved kernel backport ahead of RHEL, and a fix for excessive CPU consumption by systemd and ps during task cleanup.
“We originally submitted the fix to CentOS Stream 9, but its inclusion was deferred to at least RHEL 9.9 — so ALESCo voted to include it in 9.8 now,” Lukoshko said. “If you’ve been seeing that CPU spike during task cleanup, it’s fixed today instead of a quarter from now.”
The release also introduces new compiler toolsets, updated module streams, and improved security. In addition, it adds Python 3.14 as a new package, and brings new streams for MariaDB (11.8), PostgreSQL (18), and Ruby (4.0), as well as an updated Node.js 24 module stream. Container and virtualization support is updated with the latest versions of Podman, Buildah, libvirt, QEMU-KVM, and skopeo. Security is improved with updates to OpenSSL, OpenSSH, GnuTLS, SELinux policies, and crypto-policies.
Release notes are available on AlmaLinux’s wiki, and installation ISOs are available on the mirrors, grouped by architecture:
For those who prefer torrents, AlmaLinux offers them too:
AlmaLinux OS 10.2
This latest and greatest from AlmaLinux introduces updated compiler toolsets, new language and database packages, and improved security. It also adds Python 3.14, PostgreSQL 18, MariaDB 11.8, Ruby 4.0, and PHP 8.4 as new packages, alongside SDL3, libkrun, trustee, and FIDO Device Onboard tooling, with GNOME 49 for the desktop. Container and virtualization support is updated with the latest versions of Podman, Buildah, libvirt, QEMU-KVM, and skopeo. For security, there are updates to OpenSSL, OpenSSH, SSSD, SELinux policies, crypto-policies, and Keylime.
AlmaLinux 10.2 also brings i686 userspace packages, which enables legacy 32-bit software, CI pipelines, and containerized workloads on AlmaLinux 10.
“We first landed i686 in Kitten 10 back in April; 10.2 is where it crosses into stable,” Lukoshko explained. Kitten is AlmaLinux’s preview branch, built from CentOS Stream.
While Rocky Linux and most of the other RHEL clones work hard to maintain line-by-line parity with their upstream source, AlmaLinux is willing to go off book a bit and introduce variances from RHEL, as long as the user experience continues to mimic RHEL across the board.
“10.2 continues to ship AlmaLinux’s deviations from upstream that we’ve written about before: Btrfs support including the ability to boot from a Btrfs volume, the CRB repository enabled by default, and a parallel x86_64_v2 build with matching EPEL coverage for older hardware,” Lukoshko said.
New in this release: KVM for IBM POWER, which first appeared as a tech preview in AlmaLinux 9.6, is fully enabled in the virtualization stack; frame pointers are re-enabled by default, meaning system-wide profiling works out of the box; SPICE support is back for both server and client applications; and Firefox and Thunderbird are available as regular RPMs in the system repositories.
10.2 also includes a long list of older storage and networking drivers (Adaptec, Dell PERC, HP, Mellanox, QLogic, Emulex, LSI, Broadcom) that Red Hat had disabled.
Like 9.8, release notes are available on AlmaLinux’s wiki, and installation ISOs are available on the mirrors:
As well as torrents:
Recovering From Fragnesia
Both of these releases address the elephant in the room, being the spate of recent Linux security vulnerabilities that AI and its human helpers have recently discovered. Both new versions are patched for security vulnerabilities, including:
- Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431)
- Dirty FRAG
- Fragnesia (CVE-2026-46300)
- nginx Rift (CVE-2026-42945)
- SSH Keysign Pwn (CVE-2026-46333
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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