RHEL and its Linux Relatives and Rivals: How to Choose

fliptop writes:

There's a whole family of Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants, each with its own users. So, what's the right one for you? It depends on your needs:

Lately, I've noticed a lot of confusion about Red Hat's Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related distros, such as AlmaLinux OS, Oracle Linux, and Rocky Linux. In addition, there are Red Hat's own RHEL variants, CentOS Stream and Fedora. Mea culpa. It is confusing. Let me help straighten things out.

[...] many people used a community RHEL distro called Community Enterprise Operating system (CentOS) instead of Oracle Linux. Founded by Gregory Kurtzer, this was the most successful of the early RHEL clones. Indeed, CentOS proved to be far more popular than RHEL in such critical markets as web servers.

[...] So, first, [Red Hat] adopted CentOS in 2014. CentOS continued on its free license way, while Red Hat hoped it could persuade CentOS users to become RHEL customers. It didn't work out.

So, in late 2020, Red Hat changed CentOS from being a stable RHEL clone to being a rolling Linux release distro, CentOS Stream. In addition, the plan was that while Red Hat would continue to support the older CentOS 7 release until at least June 30, 2024, the newer CentOS 8 version, instead of being supported until 2029, would run out of support at the end of 2021.

That went over like a lead balloon with the hundreds of thousands of CentOS users.

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