[trimir2022]

Supercomputing centers and all the servers are prime candidates, where the hardware and software stack never change for the lifetime of the computer (which is around 7-8 years at least).

Do note that what users can use on that, and what system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months. The stability is more for the hardware drivers and things like that, where things are still very iffy because a lot of hardware is actually latest hardware, so not all bugs have been sorted. Infiniband for example is not stable and mainstream at all.

Ubuntu will go through two LTS releases in that time, while you can continue with a single RHEL/CentOS release.

[gnufx]

Supercomputing... Note that Summit changed from RHEL7 to RHEL8 mis-stream. (IBM insisted the system I work on had to do the same on similar hardware because the RHEL 7.9 distribution I could see didn't exist. It allowed more recent CUDA, but that wasn't the rationale.)

I don't know what "system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months" is about. Infiniband is fine, and typically quite up-to-date in RHEL, but you end up having to deal with the Mellanox nightmare, at least for Nvidia GPU support; roll on RoCM. That area is a good demonstration of the practical evil of proprietary software.