RHEL alternative AlmaLinux 9.6 “Sage Margay” is now generally available with many updates

AlmaLinux 9.6, code-named “Sage Margay”, is now generally available as the latest version of this Linux distribution that's binary compatibile with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With this release, users gain expanded support for web applications through updated module streams and enjoy optimizations from new compiler versions. These improvements target both developer productivity and overall system performance.

Building on its core, AlmaLinux 9.6 updates key debugging and monitoring tools, including elfutils, Valgrind, SystemTap, and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), helping developers diagnose and monitor systems more efficiently. For administrators, network management sees enhancements with new releases of NetworkManager and iproute, while security is improved with refreshed SELinux-policy and SSSD packages.

Focusing on modern workloads, the release delivers updated Podman, buildah, libvirt, and QEMU-KVM for containerization and virtual environments. The addition of snpguest and snphost packages further extends virtualization capabilities. For those working with IBM hardware, a technology preview supports Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization on the Power architecture.

AlmaLinux 9.6 is available across Intel/AMD64, ARM64, IBM PowerPC, and IBM Z architectures. It also offers images for cloud providers like Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud, as well as options for Raspberry Pi and the Windows Subsystem for Linux.