[secabeen]

Not necessarily. RHEL-clones are ubiquitous in high-performance computing. Clusters and super-computers are hard to setup, consist of hundreds or thousands of nodes, and are used by scientists who are not programmers by trade. The RHEL-clone model works well for them, as they can't expect their users to keep code up to date with changes in the OS, they are used by known, mostly-trusted users, and the systems they run on usually stay fixed their 5-10 year lifespan. Having a single supported OS for the entire lifetime of the system saves a lot of work.

[itomato]

Scientific Linux? Package availability and familiarity get you a long way.

[secabeen]

Scientific Linux was an RHEL-clone, and they couldn't keep it going even with RH sources.

> In April 2019, it was announced that feature development for Scientific Linux would be discontinued