[p1necone]

> better put the effort into an extra-stable-extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu

I've always thought of Debian LTS as basically the end all be all of Linux server OS stability (let's ignore the BSDs for this exercise), is the main draw of CentOS over that just the longer LTS period or is it also meaningfully more stable?

[bigbubba]

From what I understand, it's not just a matter of longer support, but also training. A lot of companies have/had mixed RHEL/CentOS environments, with RHEL on the machines they really want RH support for and CentOS on everything else to save money. Having a mixed RHEL/Debian environment would probably be a pain in the ass for all your sysadmins.

[garyrichardson]

On top of this I also believe that companies prefer the RHEL opinionated implementation of a linux system vs Debian's.

RedHat is a company that sells to other companies. Therefore it has to implement their linux and make decisions in a way that works well with how other enterprises think. Big companies aren't comfortable depending on "the community" to do the right thing for them.

[johannes1234321]

On top of all these companies want to run (commercial) software from other vendors, which sometimes is certified only on RHEL.

[joana035]

Not really, I have seen CentOS based infrastructure having more problems (xfs breaking docker, frankenkernel 3.10 in 2020?) whereas with Debian things just works and are not heavily patched to the point of breaking ABI.

[Nullabillity]

In a vacuum, absolutely. I think GP's point was that if you already have to run the frankenkernel on some machines (because of support), then it makes management easier if you at least run the same broken frankenkernel on all of them.

[bionsystem]

I've seen issues with debian as well in production systems, from the packaging systems most notably. Both distros are mostly good with some flaws.