The AlmaLinux OS Foundation has pushed out a double release, shipping both AlmaLinux 10.2 and 9.8 on 2026-05-26. The community-driven RHEL rebuild is leaning further into its identity as more than a bug-for-bug clone, with 10.2 in particular shipping a stack of deliberate deviations from upstream that matter for anyone running older silicon, container workloads, or Btrfs-based servers.
The headline addition in AlmaLinux 10.2 is stable i686 userspace support, which the project first floated in its Kitten 10 development stream back in April 2026. That brings legacy 32-bit software, CI pipelines, and containerized workloads back into reach on Enterprise Linux 10, something Red Hat itself dropped. AlmaLinux also continues to ship a parallel x86_64_v2 build with matching EPEL coverage, keeping pre-AVX2 hardware in the support window for the full lifecycle. Btrfs remains a first-class citizen, with the ability to boot directly from a Btrfs volume, and the CRB repository stays enabled by default.
On the package side, 10.2 lands GNOME 49 on the desktop alongside Python 3.14, PostgreSQL 18, MariaDB 11.8, Ruby 4.0, and PHP 8.4. New additions include SDL3, libkrun, trustee, and FIDO Device Onboard tooling, while the container and virtualization stack gets refreshed builds of Podman, Buildah, libvirt, QEMU-KVM, and skopeo. Security tooling sees updates to OpenSSL, OpenSSH, SSSD, SELinux policies, crypto-policies, and Keylime.
The simultaneous AlmaLinux 9.8 release brings Python 3.14 to the 9.x branch along with refreshed MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and Ruby module streams, plus the same container and security updates. Both releases are available now as DVD, boot, and minimal ISOs from the project's download page, with source code and build scripts hosted on GitHub.
