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Amazon Linux
Amazon's own Linux distribution, tuned for and tightly integrated with AWS, free to run on EC2 and provided with five years of security support per release.
Based on
Fedora / RHEL lineage (independent since AL2023)
First released
2010
Package manager
DNF (.rpm)
Desktop environments
None (CLI-only, cloud VM image)
Amazon Linux (now in its Amazon Linux 2023 generation) is AWS's own general-purpose distribution, optimized for performance on EC2 instances and pre-integrated with AWS tooling like the CloudWatch and SSM agents. Amazon Linux 2023 moved to a more independent development model with its own release cadence (a new major version roughly every two years, each getting five years of support) compared to earlier Amazon Linux versions that tracked RHEL/CentOS more directly. It's free to use on AWS infrastructure and is one of the most common base images for EC2 workloads specifically because of that first-party integration and support commitment from the cloud vendor itself.
MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.