Conversation

Sysadmins are rightfully freaking out because #RedHat is making RHEL closed source.

Alternatives like Alma/Rocky Linux are doomed with just a tiny fraction of the resources to play a compatibility catch-up game with the (now closed source) RHEL.

CentOS has become a community-driven rolling release project.

Ubuntu is doing weird things and it has decided to become a system built around snap - even if nobody else likes snap, and even if snaps make Ubuntu-based Docker images pure bloatware.

And Manjaro is a potentially nice project that however is guaranteed to break after installing a few AUR packages with dependencies that are too fresh for Manjaro's repos (and, in general, it's always one step away from breaking badly: https://rentry.co/manjaro-controversies), and it's managed by people who have even failed to update their own SSL certificates.

We often say that Linux won on servers, but Linux on servers definitely isn't in a good shape. If Linux runs everything and we can't afford it to go down, then it needs more public funding, or private companies will keep doing stupid things and kill the toy for everyone every time some investors knock on their door.

I could be the "btw I use Arch" guy here (and btw, I've been using Arch on most of my servers, desktops and embedded devices for more than a decade now), but even though I'm very happy with it, I also acknowledge that it's not for everyone. Not everyone wants/needs a rolling release system that requires frequent updates and runs the freshest versions of all the software. If you're ok with the rolling release approach (and, in all honesty, I don't think that a rolling release model is that bad on servers), and you want to run Linux on servers that are used by paying customers, then you may also go for CentOS Stream directly - you'll have to deal with newer/more unstable packages than RHEL, but most of the stuff released as RPM for enterprise solutions will still work.

Debian is of course another popular option, but I gave up on it a while ago, as I was tired of using packages that were 3-4 years old, and risk breaking the system with backports. Sure, you can use snap/flatpack/Docker images on it, but that you could also do on any other Linux distro, right? But if you're a guy who needs to run RHEL-like systems (e.g. stick to a distro with packages that barely change for a couple of years), then you may probably go for Debian.

What are you folks running on your servers? Are the recent decisions from RedHat/Canonical pushing you to consider changing? Are you one of those who's currently considering screwing Linux for *BSD for good?