The AlmaLinux team revealed a new distribution, but don’t get too excited. It is not intended to be a new flavor or intended for production use.

AlmaLinux OS Kitten is a new variant of AlmaLinux, but not a new distro, or a new version, or anything actually intended for real distribution or use. “Kitten” is more like a public prototype of what will eventually become AlmaLinux 10. Kitten, combined with the project’s other announcement, is due in part to the latest of Red Hat’s changes to its development and release process.

Already in February, IBM’s subsidiary announced it it would stop dropping separate beta versions of RHEL point releases. Formerly, Big Purple Hat’s release schedule saw it push out a point version every six months, with a public beta one month before release. It is now moving to incremental releases of beta versions of individual packages.

Reg The FOSS desktop may of course simply be overly cynical, but to us this looks like the latest in a long line of steps to make life a little more difficult for RHEL downstream, as we summarized last year. This started back in 2011, when the company started combining updates into one big file to complicate matters for Oracle et al. At the time Linux Weekly News called this obfuscated core source.

The next minor release of RHEL will be RHEL 9.5, and there won’t be a public beta… but for a taste of what it will look like, there is a beta of AlmaLinux 9.5. As far as we can see at the moment, there is currently no news about Rocky Linux 9.5.

With a long-term perspective, AlmaLinux kitten comes from CentOS Stream 10, and is an internal upstream of what will eventually become AlmaLinux 10. As the project wiki says:

There are already a bunch of changes to differentiate Kitten from its CentOS Stream 10 upstream. Which did AlmaLinux 9.4 in Aprilwill it support hardware that CentOS and RHEL release. In this case, it supports version 2 of the x86-64 instruction set. When SUSE was considering which versions to support, we did described the versions and their differences… and when it chose, we mentioned that RHEL 9 needs x86-64-v2. So does Alma’s kitten, while its purple shade upstream needs x86-64-v3 or higher.

This means some degree of incompatibility as it may be that products targeting CentOS 10 or RHEL 10 will also need the newer CPUs, and the Alma developers are considering rebuilding EPEL package repo for the older CPU architecture. Comments, the notice says, are welcome.

AlmaLinux Kitten also enables ramp pointers by default, as well Ubuntu 24.04 and later. The announcement links to a detailed discussion what this means. It will cause a very small performance decrease, about 1 percent, but enabling them will make diagnostics and performance tuning tools work much better.

Another mention in the release announcement caught our attention. Although the Rocky Linux project tends to make more noise, like its recently announced certification programsthere are plenty of other CentOS Linux rebuilds out there, as we noted when The Open Enterprise Linux Alliance was announced. One of the lesser-known distros in the West that we mentioned then has merged with AlmaLinux: the Japanese one Miracle Linux distribution (Pēji wa nihongo desu). Its creator, Cybertrust, is one platinum sponsor of AlmaLinux.

AlmaLinux Kitten supports KVM on IBM POWER processors, restores SPICE protocol for accessing screens on virtual machines, and the default repositories include RPM packages of both Firefox and Thunderbird – all features removed in RHEL 9 and later releases.

The release notes are already available, and contain details of the newer versions of Kitten’s various development tools and so on. At the top it is marked:

Some brave souls maybe though. After all, there is one Fedora Server edition out there, which is upstream from the CentOS Stream itself. It is notoriously difficult to find out any hard numbers about Linux market share. We still don’t know how many organizations are using CentOS Stream, but some intrepid souls are, like Reddit revealed. A user is public and it’s bigger than most: Meta uses CentOS Stream. ®