AlmaLinux 10.2, "Lavender Lion," demonstrates how far the enterprise Linux distribution has moved beyond its origins as a one-for-one rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
The release maintains binary compatibility with RHEL while restoring support for older hardware and adding capabilities not available in RHEL 10. Those differences provide a clearer view of what AlmaLinux can do now that it is no longer committed to strictly reproducing RHEL.
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation launched AlmaLinux 10.2 on May 26. The release includes updated developer toolchains, expanded language and database support, refreshed container and virtualization tooling, and security updates.
In 2023, Red Hat stopped publishing RHEL source code through the public git.centos.org repository and made CentOS Stream the primary public source for RHEL-related code. The change prompted the AlmaLinux OS Foundation to move away from its 1:1, bug-for-bug clone model and instead maintain application binary interface (ABI) compatibility using CentOS Stream and other publicly available sources. AlmaLinux 10.2 provides some of the strongest evidence yet of what that greater independence allows the project to do.
According to Benny Vasquez, chair of the Foundation's Board of Directors, 10.2 is the first release to show what moving from a strict 1:1 clone to a focus on binary compatibility makes possible. A strict clone could not re-enable frame pointers for profiling, restore storage and network drivers the community still relies on, or add Btrfs support.
