[anonunivgrad]

Two totally different markets. RHEL (and its free clone, CentOS, rip) are for regulated industries or anyone who values extreme stability over any newness. You can turn updates on and feel as safe as you can be against known exploits while at the same time feeling as confident as you can that your stuff won’t break. Once or twice a decade, you port to a new version and then go back to not thinking about it too much.

[ddevault]

I feel confident about this with Alpine Linux. It doesn't have this sense of newness and bleeding edge. It is extremely stable and I have run upgrades on it for years without even a single issue. They release twice annually and the upgrade process is almost trivial. Keeping up with it is easy and a good practice for any organization.

[anonunivgrad]

I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be there to handle these issues. They’re thinking like a hospital that can’t risk downtime and is not a software company, even if they hire a few engineers here and there.

[ddevault]

Don't make me repeat myself with respect to new features and stability.

[anonunivgrad]

You dismiss, elsewhere in this thread, the need to be on the same OS and package versions for years. That’s what people want sometimes. They don’t want to tinker with the system. They don’t need any new functionality, not this year, not next year, not in five years. They built a service, it works, and they can deploy to RHEL and (mostly) forget about it for a long time. As the end of the LTS period approaches, they can do the work to migrate and then forget about it again for a decade. Note that “they” is not just the organization running the system, but also the vendors of bespoke or otherwise niche software used by the organization. Any problem might mean getting billed big bucks per hour of engineering work.