AlmaLinux OS

Reader supplied reviews for AlmaLinux OS Average rating 8.1 from 67 review(s) What are your thoughts on AlmaLinux OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 10.09.68.10 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 10.0 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-06-30 Votes: 4 Wow. This OS is damn fast on my HP 8570w. I was a big fan of Centos 7 that lasted much longer than Windows Systems on my PCs. As a scientific user I am interested in a stable, reliable, fast running system. I can live with some convenience obstacles. But not with buggy systems. IBM decision to terminate Centos and the lack of support for older machines in RHEL 10 was a shock for me. Maybe I can afford Windows. But I want to live sustainable and I am not willing to retire my still excellent old machines. OS Almalinux enabled me to proceed my principle of sustainability. I cannot comment on long-term stability of AlmaLinux till date because the system is just on air a view weeks. Because of very good experience with Alma 9.6 I gave Alma 10 a trial. There are definitely a lot of pros + extremly fast boot time. Alma 9 was already fast in comparision to ubuntu. + seems to be enterprise quality as I know from the real Centos + x86-64 v2 support - my gorgeous HP machine can run additional 10 years safe! That's alone a reason for installation + seems to be fully RHEL, Epel compatible + reasonable update cycles as they were with Centos all the years + so far everything is running stable and smooth + Gnome 47 rocks as well as KDE 6.3 + very clean and nice boot process without ugly messages during boot process There are minor issues that could be solved by the Alma-Team easily - still there is a warning message for deprecated hardware during boot although I installed the x86-64 v2 ISO - the discover software package management has not to offer many - LibreOffice, Darktable and Gimp had to be installed via flatpak. No big deal. So I give this awesome system a 9-Rating. That based on my use case. If you are a typical desktop user there might be better alternatives like Mint that come with software packages and additional install options without a hassle. But for me the long support and enterprise quality is the dealbreaker. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 10.0 Rating: 7 Date: 2025-05-31 Votes: 2 AlmaLinux 9+ – Great for Servers, Less So for Desktops I’ve tested multiple AlmaLinux 9+ versions on two machines for desktop use: an older AMD-based PC and a newer laptop. First, the positives: it's great that AlmaLinux offers a free Red Hat–compatible experience. Installation is straightforward and cleaner than RHEL’s own. The system feels stable and well put together. I appreciated the flexibility of choosing between GNOME and KDE desktops. However, desktop performance has been disappointing regarding graphics and animations: Old PC: This machine struggles with animations entirely. I had to disable them just to keep the system usable. I did manage to get the AMD driver working once with version 9.1, but from 9.2 onward, no luck—graphics issues persist, and the desktop is barely usable. New Laptop: All hardware is detected, and the system runs, but desktop animations (on both GNOME and KDE) are visibly laggy. For desktop environments, Fedora is clearly a better choice. It offers the same ecosystem with much better graphics performance and a more responsive user experience out of the box. AlmaLinux seems better suited for servers or minimal workstation setups, not for general-purpose desktop use. Rating: 7/10 — Stable and functional, but laggy desktop performance and driver issues hold it back for desktop users. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 9.5 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-01-20 Votes: 7 AlmaLinux 9.5 as a laptop workstation Installed the 9.4 Xfce Live boot image, ran the installer, upgraded to 9.5. I got XFCE working nicely and was satisfied for a couple weeks until I tried to use Bluetooth. Blueman and other Bluetooth GUIs for XFCE were not in EPEL, compiling Blueman was a fail, bluetoothctl worked, but was a pain as well. So I did: dnf groupinstall “Sever with GUI” systemctl start gdm.service systemctl enable gdm.service dnf remove lightdm dnf remove xfce* (maybe I should have done “dnf group remove XFCE”?) AlmaLinux 9.5 Gnome on a 4 year old laptop is flawless. No need to mention it is rock solid. I tried CentOS several years ago and it was a real pain to set up for a laptop. Today it is a piece of cake. My main Gen 13 CPU workstation is Fedora so I wanted something similar for my older gen 10 CPU laptop and something on a different life cycle. I looked at Rocky Linux, but the AlmaLinux community, documents and support seemed more vibrant. Anyway it’s dual boot and I use AlmaLinux (or whatever distro) 99 percent of the time. To install AlmaLinux with Windows, install Windows first, shrink the big Windows partition in the Windows disk/partition manager to free up space for the Linux install. Install AlmaLinux and the final Grub update will install Windows to the Grub boot menu. It’s a big hassle with Windows Pro bitlocker freaking out everytime Grub updates. Doesn’t seem to be a problem with the new Windows Home encryption. I suppose there is a workaround for Windows Pro. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 67 reader reviews of AlmaLinux OS...