RHEL and derivatives have long been the standard in the Ops world for their stability. Rocky Linux and Alma linux are the main two community editions, they are both supported by pretty good communities, so it's hard to pick one.

Seems Ubuntu was largely popular with devs and the masses due to it's ease of use back in the day. Never understood why more didn't just go with Fedora back then.

My last dip into alternative distros (~2 years ago) for my dev desktop was quickly over by various problems/missing settings for display, audio and network. Not saying it wouldn't have worked (one was even ubuntu based), but I had to go and configure desktop stuff on the CLI, including having to figure out how. I rather not.

I'm absolutely fine running something else on a server though and my docker images are usually alpine based. But for desktop Ubuntu is the closest to "looks decent and just works"

How's Rocky coming along?

I used to be a RHEL admin and was just more comfortable over there, but after the whole CentOS mess I ended up running Ubuntu LTS at home instead - I just wanted a "set it and forget it" machine so I didn't go with Fedora.

I'm currently regretting that decision, as I'm really not looking forward to devoting another weekend to rebuilding again.

I don't know about Rocky, but I updated all my CentOS systems (about a dozen desktops and a file server) to Stream and they work fine. The changeover has been pretty much a non-event.

I just rebuilt one my ceph nodes with Rocky 9. Seems they are pretty closely tracking RHEL. I think Alma is a little quicker with patches, but both are fast.

> Never understood why more didn't just go with Fedora back then.

For me at least: back then Fedora didn't have a supported non-terminal way to upgrade to a newer major version. (Whereas now upgrading Fedora is more polished and simpler than Ubuntu.)

Fedora, while very nice, goes too fast. Basically as fast, as the non-LTS ubuntu releases. Ubuntu has the LTS option, for Fedora, that LTS option was CentOS and today Rocky/Alma.

Fedora is supported for 1 year. Ubuntu non-LTS is supported for 9 months.

Subjectively Fedora has a far more robust updater and just higher quality releases in general IME.

9mo vs 1y is not a much of practical difference.

With the rest, I agree. I run fedora on my desktop, but I would not use it for my parents, for example. Even with LTS, they were complaining that it changes all the time.

what about centos stream?

If it works for you, why not. Just be aware, that the point releases did have breaking ABI changes, and now they can happen randomly, without waiting for point release.

Since I used the old, non-stream centos, the changes left some bitter taste. Enough to prefer alma.

Better marketing, I suppose. Many people really think Linux = Ubuntu.

Wouldn't Debian be a safer choice? Ubuntu is just layers on top of Debian (one of the layers being the "pro" thing, it seems...). So Debian should the the obvious solution. RHEL would be the most likely to move in the same direction as Ubuntu, wouldn't it?