[zanny]

Software availability and versioning in the Red Hat ecosystem sucks. Either you are using Fedora, where software is usually just frozen bleeding edge circa Manjaro, where breakage does happen and that cannot be accepted in production, or you are running upwards of 5 year old versions of software.

The Ubuntu LTS cycle is just an optimal compromise in my book. You even get Debian Testing as a good rolling release, Debian Stable as a great server release, Ubuntu Server as an enterprise option, and they all (soon) will be using a common core.

For now I advocate the SUSE's, but while it has been stable the general obscurity of it and the dwindling userbase and the fact Novel (I know they have also since sold SUSE) backed out of maintaining OpenSUSE directly, I can't be confident in its future. You cannot underestimate the Ubuntu mindshare, because it means "Linux" software is often Ubuntu first, repackaged by hobbyists for other distros second.