[teilo]

Yes, we care about flavors of Linux in the enterprise. RHEL is an industry standard distribution that nearly all vendors support. We have a significant amount of commercial software that is only supported on RHEL or its derivates. Not running on a supported distro? You get no support. That’s a non-starter for mission critical systems in the enterprise.

We used to be able to run this software, fully supported, on CentOS. IBM pulled the rug out from under us. Rocky and Alma rose to the occasion, and the various vendors supported one or both, since it was still RHEL minus branding. Now IBM is cutting off those distros also in an attempt to force everyone into RHEL licenses and support contracts.

But because it IS Linux, after all, a lot of enterprises like mine have NEVER needed support for the OS itself. We just needed our vendors to support their software running on it, and we needed vulnarability patching on the OS, something which CentOS, Rocky, and Alma always provided.

If I had my way, 100% of what we run would be on Debian. I have Debian running everywhere possible. But not all 3rd party applications support Debian. I’m hoping that one consequence of IBM’s move here will be to drive them all to Debian.

[volkadav]

Yeah, I'm hopeful the five year support window for Debian LTS releases now will help drive that migration. I suspect though the lowest-effort path for migrating from one commercial vendor to another will be towards Canonical, given Ubuntu's LTS releases and existing infrastructure around commercial support / certified hardware compatibility lists / etc. I may not be a huge fan of some of their decisions over the years but as my objections have tended to be technical rather than business/contractual/ethical I think they'd be nicer to deal with than IBM or Oracle, heh. :)