First major release since IBM spent $34b buying distro giant, includes kernel 5.14, systemd 249, Python 3.9 and more
Red Hat Summit Red Hat has officially lifted the lid on version 9 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), code-named Plow, the latest major version of the dominant paid-for, commercial server Linux. This release aims to roll out features and functionality without being too different from its older siblings. Version 9 represents a number of firsts. It’s the first major release since IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat concluded in July 2019 – RHEL 8.0 came out two months before. It’s also the first major version of the enterprise distribution since Red Hat redefined its free enterprise distro CentOS as being upstream of RHEL rather than a rebuild of it. The Reg looked at the beta last year. This release is based on Fedora 34, which we covered in March last year. That means several significant changes for desktop users, including GNOME 40, which should run on Wayland by default, the Pipewire audio server, and incremental updates to Flatpak packages.
