AlmaLinux 9 It is the new major version of what has become the successor to CentOS and derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the boldest of all those that already existed, but also of those that emerged after the decline of the community side.
Thus, AlmaLinux 9 arrives following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, almost attached to it in time and totally in tune with what is new at the system level, so anyone interested in learning more about what it brings this new version, you will do well to check the above link.
In summary, AlmaLinux 9 picks up from RHEL 9 all its updates, including the performance optimizations and security improvements applied, in addition to the new versions of components such as programming languages, frameworks and other tools focused on development. In this regard, AlmaLinux 9 adds new repositories for SAP and SAPHANA.
However, AlmaLinux 9 also introduces things of “own harvest” or, better said, of someone else’s harvest but of their own accord, against the current of Red Hat’s behavior. The highlight, only for those who intend to use the system as a workstation, the option to easily install alternative desktop environments to the default GNOME.

AlmaLinux 9
Specifically, AlmaLinux 9 provides live images with «GNOME, GNOME-mini, KDE, Xfce and more«, a novelty for a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not only that, even in the official announcement of AlmaLinux 9 they reserve a space to talk about “visual improvements”, which are nothing more than a renewed set of wallpapers (very nice, yes).
For more information about AlmaLinux, see the release notes, which also details all the system changes since its previous version, AlmaLinux 8.6, which was released just a couple of weeks ago.
Regarding the download of AlmaLinux 9, the distribution will now be offered for Intel/AMD (x86_64), ARM64 (aarch64), IBM PowerPC (ppc64le) and IBM Z (s390x) architectures, as well as images for cloud services for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Open Nebula and other providers; Docker images, for Raspberry Pi and also for Windows Subsystem for Linux (all these sources are listed in the official announcement).
In another order of things, those responsible for the project continue to work on the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, to make AlmaLinux a fully community project and encourage the community to participate in this foundation.