At long last, a new certification process is here! There are four things most exciting to me about this: 1 - The barrier to submitting certifications is almost none We have always had a concept of community-submitted certification in the program, but the steps required to get things added were too complex and took too much time. The new process allows anyone to submit a certification in ~10 minutes - sometimes a lot less. 2 - Communication and coordination are no longer a blocker to Certification. Historically, hardware providers were asked to set up and provide dedicated hardware for us for at least 3-5 days to be able to get certified. The need to converse with anyone is now limited to verifying that the submissions are actually coming from a vendor. The actual certification process takes 10 minutes or less from install of the RPM. 3 - The program now includes Software Certification. It's been a long time coming, but we finally have a good way for folks to show that software works on AlmaLinux. We have a backlog of software to add already, and I’m sure we’ll see even more as y’all pick this up. One of the biggest impacts for all of this is that we will be able to go to hardware and software providers with data to support our requests for official AlmaLinux support. We can show them that the real scope of of adding AlmaLinux support is incredibly low with data instead of anecdotally. Please - if you’re running AlmaLinux on any bare metal hardware, take a few minutes to run the certification and submit the results. It’s one of the best ways you can help us. There’s more information about the new process in this blog post from Jonathan, and you can find the full details on our website. https://almalinux.org/blog/2026-09-24-certification-in-minutes/ https://almalinux.org/certification/ benny Vasquez Chair, Board of Directors @AlmaLinux OS Foundation *I am sending this message now because it suits me, but I don’t expect that you will read, respond to, or act on it outside of comfortable hours for your time zone.*