On 12/29/20 8:33 AM, Simon Matter wrote: > For me the characteristics of RedHat EL/CentOS have always been: > * It's stable, and stable for 10 years minus the first ~1-2. > * It's old and outdated, nothing to make developers happy. > * It provides a quite limited package set with high stability and quality. > A lot of interesting stuff (things like Tomcat) have to be installed from > elsewhere without stability and high quality or easy management. > * It has a lot of competitors but the long support is unique. > * As an admin, if you have a lot developers around you, you ALWAYS have to > defend the usage of RHEL/CentOS because ALMOST EVERY developer would like > to use something else. For me it makes more sense to pick a distro based on application needs, it saves a lot of trouble if what you need isn't directly supported by RHEL base repos: * if your organization or customers mandate RHEL, or you need third-party hardware drivers or expensive applications (CAD, medical imaging, FEA, physics simulations) only certified on RHEL, then RHEL it is * if you're developing upstream software like the kernel, or for statically-linked microservices or utilities in Go, Fedora has the latest upstream releases and is very stable considering how fast it changes * if you develop application with lots of dependencies, like Java enterprise apps or apps in Rails or Django, the huge selection of packages in Debian or Ubuntu LTS will provide you stable versions with security updates handled by the Debian or Canonical security teams, so your application keeps running without fighting Maven or having to choose between a security vulnerability and a newer version in a third-party repo breaking your application (Debian almost never breaks something with security updates or point releases, because they don't backport new features to old versions, proprietary hardware drivers are not an issue with Ubuntu or Debian if running on AWS, and HP and Dell offer physical servers with Ubuntu LTS support[0]) * if you need DTrace, ZFS or the best network throughput, FreeBSD can do that very well (but FreeBSD Ports is similar to Gentoo, no stable versions that only get security updates) Backpack, formerly 37signals, wrote in 2006 that they run RHEL 6 on the database servers while their application servers use Ubuntu LTS, so I guess I'm not the only one looking at this pragmatically.[1] I only used Debian and CentOS until now, but I think Ubuntu got so popular because they hit the sweet spot: 5 years of support and you get the same binaries and timely security updates even if you don't pay anything (10 years of support with Ubuntu Advantage, paid), big selection of packages, reasonably new versions of packages, third-party driver support from some OEMs, PPAs from Nginx and others, many developers you would hire are already familiar with it from home (I only used Debian and CentOS, not Ubuntu, though). [0] https://linux.dell.com/files/supportmatrix/Ubuntu_Support_Matrix.pdf [1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3202-behind-the-scenes-the-hardware-that-powers-basecamp-campfire-and-highrise