External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
My main use case for AlmaLinux is to build a custom image on top of the AlmaLinux image provided by TuxCare. I use that custom image to supply it through all the stakeholders, for example, different teams to use it to launch VMs or containers for whatever workloads they have, and these images are created by our team.
The use case with AlmaLinux is that we are using a common OS platform for our entire environment, which was earlier divided into multiple operating systems.
In terms of support provided by TuxCare, it is good, particularly regarding patching and updates. The OS updates are prompt compared to when we were using Amazon Linux, which had unpredictable patches and a lot of vulnerabilities.
The prompt patching and OS updates with AlmaLinux have helped our team by improving our FedRAMP compliance and vulnerability scan reports, since AlmaLinux connects better with KernelCare provided by TuxCare. We are also using JFrog with these new AlmaLinux images, which means the AlmaLinux repositories for package updates provided by TuxCare are updated more frequently compared to other repositories such as Amazon Linux 2.
AlmaLinux has positively impacted our organization because our goal was to generalize our entire fleet into one operating system, which earlier was not the case as we were using around seven to eight different operating systems. We have now taken up this project to drive it from a central image, allowing us to deploy common security agents, monitoring agents, and different compliance packages or patching workflows to the entire fleet. That centralization has been progressing well.
In terms of how AlmaLinux can be improved, while I praise the patching part, the support provided by TuxCare needs to be more prompt and responsive. We feel they are not taking ownership of addressing a lot of vulnerabilities in some operating systems that are not patched even though fixes are available in open sources. We also expect KernelCare to be better integrated with AlmaLinux, as it is integrated well but the patch sets are not available promptly for AlmaLinux operating systems.
Definitely, the community support has to be improved, and we would also appreciate enhancements in the documentation part.
I have been using AlmaLinux for the last one to one and a half years.
We are measuring specific outcomes since moving to AlmaLinux, but we have not come up with those metrics yet because until the last one or two months, we were in the development phase where I was part of building the image. Now the images are being used by different stakeholders or teams, so we will see the results.
I would advise others looking into using AlmaLinux to first fix their strategy for patching and have that in place, as we rely on KernelCare for our OS patching, but it seems to lag behind, causing us to breach our SLAs for FedRAMP and PCI. If your automations are stronger or if you rely on relaunch-based updates or use new images with continuous patching and reboots for the machines, that will be a better approach. I rate this product a seven because, as I mentioned, there are criticisms mainly around patching. Since we own the patching, it needs some improvement, and since it is a new operating system, the patch sets are not readily available, so that area needs work. Better community support such as that of Ubuntu or RHEL might lead to better results.
My main use case for AlmaLinux is to set up many machines on AlmaLinux for another application for our organization. I mainly use AlmaLinux to configure and manage multiple machines and to run applications for our system. For example, I have to set up an AlmaLinux server to host a web application stack using Nginx, PHP, and a PostgreSQL database, which support our internal services and APIs.
In my experience, the best features AlmaLinux offers are the stability and enterprise-grade stability, long-term support, broad software compatibility, predictable and secure updates, easy migration from CentOS, and being free and open source and well-suited for automation and DevOps. Because AlmaLinux is binary compatible with Red Hat, it provides a very stable and reliable operating system suitable for production environments.
AlmaLinux has impacted our organization positively by providing a stable and reliable enterprise Linux platform without licensing cost. It has allowed me to replace CentOS and avoid expensive commercial subscriptions while maintaining full compatibility with Red Hat-based applications. As a result, we have reduced operating costs, especially for server infrastructure, while keeping a high level of security, performance, and long-term support.
AlmaLinux is already a very solid and reliable operating system, but it could be improved in a few areas. For example, more extensive official documentation and practical case use examples would help new users adopt it more quickly. Faster availability of certain packages or clear communication around the release timeline could further improve the user experience. Enhanced tooling or GUIs for in-place major version upgrades would also be beneficial for organizations managing large infrastructures.
I have been using AlmaLinux for one year.
In my experience, AlmaLinux is very stable.
AlmaLinux's scalability is impressive. It is very scalable and performs well both on small deployments and large-scale infrastructure with many servers. I have been able to add new machines easily without change to our architecture or processes.
The customer support for AlmaLinux is good.
I had to switch to AlmaLinux because of the cost of the subscription manager.
My experience with AlmaLinux in terms of pricing, installation cost, and license has been very positive because AlmaLinux is free and open source with no licensing or subscription fees, which significantly reduced our operating cost in comparison to commercial enterprise Linux distributions.
The most immediate benefit has been the elimination of licensing and subscription fees compared to commercial enterprise Linux distributions or Windows.
My advice to others looking into using AlmaLinux is that I want to continue using it for the future infrastructure. I would rate this review as a 9.
I provide hosting and email services for customers using AlmaLinux. Most of our customers are using Plesk for managing their domains, and some servers end up having 300 or 400 domains, while others have around 50. Overall, the setup is the same; all of them are using AlmaLinux 9 or AlmaLinux 8, and we are currently configuring and migrating all of our infrastructure towards the newer AlmaLinux technologies and operating systems.
In my experience, the best features that AlmaLinux offers are not really different when comparing it with CentOS because we actually migrated from CentOS to AlmaLinux. AlmaLinux seems a bit more stable, but if we're talking about speed and efficiency, I noticed some gaps. For example, some of the services or web services that we are using acted differently on CentOS compared to AlmaLinux 9 or AlmaLinux 8 in terms of response times and memory consumption. We had many issues with memory consumption, and when we actually migrated initially, we migrated from servers that were using around 8 gigabytes of RAM, but when migrated to AlmaLinux 8, they needed more memory instead. So the customer needed to actually buy more memory. Even though AlmaLinux provided more stability and security patches, this came with a cost in terms of memory usage, and that was not really expected.
Positively, I can say that AlmaLinux has brought a sense of stability, and besides the security patches, we also noticed better virtualization for our use cases. Stability, security patches, and improved virtualization are the main positive aspects I have observed.
I would like to see better tools in terms of memory consumption with AlmaLinux. I would like to know what processes exactly are consuming how much memory and have better core dumps or system core dumps so I can access them and investigate them instead of feeding the server with more and more memory. Another thing I would like to see is still about memory consumption; I would like to see an optimized kernel for AlmaLinux. The AlmaLinux team can look into this and see what they can improve in terms of resource consumption and monitoring tools that can actually help the users of AlmaLinux pinpoint the exact processes or services that are causing that amount of resource consumption.
Memory consumption when we migrated from CentOS to AlmaLinux was a really big hit for us, and we didn't expect it. After six months of migration, we ended up using more resources for the same websites, and that's not acceptable.
I have been working in my current field for about five years.
AlmaLinux is stable.
AlmaLinux customer support is really nice; they provided us with quite some solutions for the problems we encountered.
Negative
We used CentOS before AlmaLinux.
We are the provider; we provide AlmaLinux servers and infrastructure to our customers.
My advice for others looking into using AlmaLinux is to just try it out and see if it suits your needs, and if it does, that's great. I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.
My main use case for AlmaLinux involves using it for web servers, mail servers, and local development servers, and also for Docker. My web servers use AlmaLinux to serve websites to inform my customers using Apache, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, and Docker is being run on different application servers, hosting a myriad of applications.
The best features AlmaLinux offers include long-term support, which was the main reason I switched from Ubuntu to CentOS. I was shocked when they killed support for CentOS 8 within a year, even though they had promised about nine years. I am very glad AlmaLinux stepped up and still provides that level of support.
The long-term support provided by AlmaLinux helps my business by ensuring that we do not have to renew our servers every four to five years. Migrations can be quite labor-intensive, so being able to have a server run for as many years as that is excellent, giving us enough time to spin up new servers to slowly migrate information. In the meantime, Ubuntu has started supporting or giving longer support terms as well, thanks to Ubuntu Pro or ESM, but that was a little bit too late. So mainly, we do not have to migrate servers every four or five years, allowing us to focus on projects other than simply spinning up new servers and migrating data.
I would like to add that the ability to use the DNF package manager and different modules, such as various versions of PostgreSQL and external repositories like Remi for different PHP versions, is a great feature. I found that to be much easier to support several versions than I was able to on Ubuntu.
One area for improvement with AlmaLinux is the use of SELinux to secure and harden my server, which I find to be a complicated beast. Better documentation on that part could be useful, although there is a lot of material out there.
I choose a nine because nothing is ever perfect. For example, coming from Ubuntu, I found their firewall software easy to use, while with AlmaLinux's entire ecosystem, I always have to look up how to use firewall-cmd. These are just little preferences. I cannot think of anything else AlmaLinux could improve; it serves me well, and I have not been missing anything.
I have been using AlmaLinux since about the time Red Hat, or IBM I think, killed off support for CentOS 8, so shortly after that. I am not sure which year that was.
After switching to AlmaLinux, I experienced that with Ubuntu, services would not reboot, restart, or start automatically when rebooting a server with the same installs and configurations, but I have not encountered such issues with AlmaLinux, making it very stable.
I have no issues with the scalability of AlmaLinux.
I have not needed customer support for AlmaLinux.
I previously used Ubuntu before moving to CentOS for its long-term support, and then I switched to AlmaLinux because CentOS was killed off.
I have not seen a return on investment in terms of needing fewer employees since I am a single-person business, but moving over to AlmaLinux saves a lot of time because of the long-term support, meaning I do not have to support the latest version every couple of years.
AlmaLinux is free, so there are no costs there. The open source licensing helps a lot, and the setup cost is just my own time invested in learning the platform.
Before choosing AlmaLinux, I evaluated Rocky Linux, but it seemed to have the same organizational issues that CentOS faced. I found AlmaLinux to be a safe bet for the long run as it is supported by a foundation without commercial interests. I also contemplated moving back to Ubuntu, but that would have required rewriting all of our configuration scripts, which I did not have time for after just doing that for CentOS.
My advice for others looking into using AlmaLinux is to probably try looking up or learning about this flavor of Linux, their package managers, and SELinux. At the end of the day, it is mostly the same with a different coat. I have no additional thoughts about AlmaLinux; it is a great overall operating system for servers. I gave this review a rating of 9.
My main use case for AlmaLinux is to use it for our servers, maintaining it as the backbone of our infrastructure, such as the data centers for our system, our web server, our application server, and everything else we do, making it the backbone of our system and infrastructure architecture. We use AlmaLinux for our business case.
The best features AlmaLinux offers focus on enterprise service, such as a server engine for our database, as well as compatibility with other external environments, being useful for Red Hat and CentOS, and very ideal for our company, where we also have DevOps, making it the backbone of infrastructure for the CI/CD pipeline and Docker deployment and everything else, plus security, as we use it for firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and monitoring services such as Prometheus and Grafana. We specifically use AlmaLinux because of its stability, its binary compatibility with RHEL, and the additional promotions for everything else.
The most valuable feature I find in AlmaLinux is the binary compatibility with RHEL and the long-term stability, which makes it a predictable, rock-solid system behavior, while also having small and safe packaging for subsystems or systems that run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It is also very useful for long-term projects as a company's software for release, with a huge ecosystem, which is why I appreciate it so much, along with the security, as it offers a stable kernel API with timely security patches. The tooling stability for DevOps is also significant, allowing easy use of infrastructure as code with Ansible or scripting playbooks that remain valid for years, making it especially important for the CI/CD pipelines.
AlmaLinux has positively impacted my organization by being the backbone of our system, which is vital for our revenue as the backbone of our data center.
I am not certain how AlmaLinux can be improved since we simply use it and do not face any security issues.
If AlmaLinux could provide ten to twenty years of fixes, that would be an improvement because I do not want to update the system all the time, as it becomes more challenging for me as a system administrator to track all the patches and everything I should patch on the system. If it could remain very stable, I would appreciate that consistently.
I have been using AlmaLinux for about five years, from two thousand eighteen until now.
The positive outcomes I have seen with AlmaLinux include very few system failures, where updates do not randomly break our servers due to the configuration and binary compatibility. Systems can run for months or years without rebooting, which is ideal for production, laboratories, and research, as I use it heavily in my research on decarbonization and carbon footprint in the company, making it very ideal for production and laboratory research, as we look for safe operating system migration and better automation possibilities with tools such as Ansible and Terraform for configuration, which behaves consistently.
Its security is another highlight, providing minimal disruptions, timely security patches, bug fixes, and a reduced attack surface.
My advice for others looking into using AlmaLinux is to prioritize its stability, reliability, predictable behavior, long-term support, and brand compatibility, along with careful planning, automation, documentation, and understanding that security Linux should not be disabled, as SELinux restricts what a user can do, keeping the major security advantages intact. I would rate this product nine out of ten.
I use AlmaLinux as the base operating system for all of our Linux servers. Our environment includes use cases that range from a load balancer on the NGINX platform to our monitoring software, Check Point, on AlmaLinux. We also run Microsoft SQL Server on AlmaLinux.
It is hard to say what needs improvement because I am on the operations side and focus on installing servers and running our software.
I have had experience with AlmaLinux for about five years.
The stability is excellent. So far, I have not experienced any issues with AlmaLinux, apart from problems related to our own software, which is a separate story.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the scalability as nine.
I have not used AlmaLinux support at all. I rely on the extensive documentation available online and various forums. Additionally, my team has several individuals who are very familiar with AlmaLinux, and we have been managing well on our own.
I previously used CentOS but switched to AlmaLinux when CentOS started having issues.
I use Ansible to install any servers in my environment.
AlmaLinux is free of charge, which is why I chose this distribution. It offers an alternative to Red Hat, which is free only without support and updates. AlmaLinux provides free updates and security, unlike Red Hat, where support must be purchased separately.
I previously used CentOS before switching to AlmaLinux.
Overall, I would rate AlmaLinux a ten. I would recommend AlmaLinux because it is a stable, simple operating system with a straightforward installation process that I have found reliable so far without any glitches. I rate the overall solution ten out of ten.
