It's important to note that this is not a clear cut endorsement. In fact Azure also sponsors Rocky Linux.

https://rockylinux.org/sponsors/

Very suspicious number of fresh accounts in here with nothing but excitement.

You're not wrong...

Does anyone know how AlmaLinux compares to Rocky Linux?

Alma seems more of a corporate thing compared to Rocky being community supported. I have both deployed and they both work fine. Alma seems faster to update, though this is RHEL, not Arch.

Alma also has a shell script that will convert other RHEL based distros to it automagically, which is pretty cool.

Rocky Linux also has a conversion script available https://rockylinux.org/migrate2rocky.sh

AlmaLinux is 501c6 non-profit, community based. RockyLinux is owned by Greg/his corporation.

If updates are a priority, you might actually be the right audience for CentOS Stream.

Does it receive security updates faster than RHEL?

Security updates, no. RHEL still gets those first due to embargoes.

Bugfixes and support for newer hardware, yes.

Mostly in who controls it. Rocky Linux has no corporate backing, while Alma is controlled by the CloudLinux people.

Rocky also has one of the original CentOS founders on board, it seems in spirit a lot more like CentOS before it got acquired by RedHat/IBM.

This is a fallacy. AlmaLinux is a 501c6 non profit. Not controlled by CloudLinux at all and CloudLinux are diluting whatever stake they have so that the community can have true ownership. AlmaLinux is trying to prevent what happened with CentOS before being taken over.

comparison: https://wiki.almalinux.org/Comparison.html

This is great news. Thank you. AlmaLinux 8 is everything CentOS should have been all along. It is nice to see a community around Linux come together so complete and provide things we have wanted as a community for so many years. Keep up the great work.

Thank you. We have more great news to come. Glad to answer any questions anyone might have.

Cool!

Nice!

Who has tried AlmaLinux OS so far?

Why would Linux distro matter these days?

Each distro seems to have a different set of value-added features, presumably for different target audiences. Check out DistroWatch for an overview:

https://distrowatch.com/

Fair. I meant server side usage. Almost everyone is into containers these. And even classical deployments with apache, java are look almost the same on centos or debian

A container runtime engine needs to be deployed onto a Linux distro. Which distro may not matter to you personally if you only use managed services, but it'll matter an awful lot to the managed service provider.

I use bare Linux servers. I do not see any differences installing docker on ubuntu vs almalinux

You do have to remember that all your containers are running with your host kernel, with your hosts isolation stack (SELinux vs AppArmor), your hosts firewall stack (ufw/firewalld/iptables/nftables) and the container engine ends up integrating with the host in lots of odd ways.

Finally, Azure is now worth it for me to try. Great work to the AlmaLinux team, you have lived up to all expectations.

Running CentOS on Azure? Then you should be testing AlmaLinux to prepare for the future.