RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Well, maybe not Redhat these days...
Debian.
Company I'm at runs Windows server. Kill me.
Oh dear god
Where I'm at, that would be Ubuntu, followed by Debian.
I work at NASA and we use redhat a lot for development work.
Mostly mission critical server that I deployed in the past, all use RHEL/Clones because their LTS, and stability across packages version.
If for hobbyist, it's Ubuntu. I think you need to learn more about ansible, container/podman/openshift, and SDN for work. Nowdays, there are some use APT in production, but mostly they switch to dnf because dnf have better way to do downgrade, undo, redo, and config package in production.
This applied mostly for ERP project such as SAP Hanna, SQL Server, DB2, etc... Like it not, Red Hat Dwindling isn't now, probably 5-10 years ahead, but I'm not sure, as mostly rant about RHEL are in Community. I do know regional linux user group in Indonesia, some are leaving EL group, but they still can't rip apart most mission critical server on top of RHEL/Clones... so it's still worth learning RHEL/Clones, and use Fedora for day 2 day task, and learn ubuntu, as well ubuntu pro, for learn deploying critical production server.
Debian and Ubuntu are near, and ubuntu is derived from debian, but if you talk spirit, they are different... If you are conscious about what Red Hat do, stay away from it, but if you are working in corporate, you can't go without learning it.
All of my personal servers are Debian. My last company switched their entire production fleet from centos to Debian. I think a lot of people switched to Debian back when the Centos Stream debacle went down.
I've been seeing a lot of alpine based containers recently. Used to see a lot of Ubuntu, debian, redhat.
I think a lot of it depends on if you are spinning a lot of containers up.
To tag onto this, what makes RHEL so special? Is it just the support you get from Red Hat or is there something about the distro that makes it so widely used?
Beyond support agreements that others are mentioning, the huge requirement for the shop I work at (mid-scale high performance computing center) it’s 3rd party vendor package support. Mellanox/nvidia, whamcloud, slurm, vast, and on and on. Driver packages targeting rhel kernels are an industry standard offering if a vendor supports linux. That’s not always the case with Debian variants, for instance.
Same with huge applications and proprietary compiler suites (think matlab and the intel compiler suite or OneAPI). These are hugely important packages for a number of shops.
Don’t get me wrong, I can build against plenty of other distros but my vendors target rhel as a first class citizen for both build scripts and straight binary packaging.
Support contracts for risk mitigation is a big part of it, and the other is RH release engineering is amazing.
Aside from that, RHEL, and clones, is a very straight forward, clean distro. It’s very focused with everything doted and tidy, and overall, it has a very uncomplicated feel to it. In contrast Debian derivatives are kind of messy, and SUSE tries to stuff every function into a single application.
RHEL does push a lot of technology. Out of the stable distros, it will be the first to put tech into production. RH does a lot with integration with other systems. This has kept me off of SUSE in the past. RHEL was more tech forward, comparatively.
It is 100% the support. Corporations pay big money to have experts on call to fix things fast when they break, and there's basically no other player for that kind of model in the Linux space.
A lot of my clients were using CentOS. Not sure what'll happen next now that Red Hat killed CentOD.
I've seen some organisations move from CentOS to Rocky Linux.
ime: red hat & centos dominate with ubuntu, debian, suse and amazon linux all a distant 2nd.
i also expect it to change given red hat's recent decision to stop sharing their source.
i dont get why people do not just use debian. especially if they got their own it person / support
Personal take: RHEL is a very high quality well integrated OS. Debian is a mess of community opinion all conflicting held together by outdated and poor tooling.
i find both rhel and debian tooling very outdated to be honest.
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
Debian consultancy never near RHEL, that's why they need to work hard on that, and make industry standard.
Red Hat drive the industry standard for more than 20 years... That make every Corp lean to it, and it won't dwindling soon.. Unless other are making Debian standardized.
Ubuntu tried it, still not even taking chunk I guess? Mostly Enterprise is RHEL/Clones.
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
that is just corp talk for "it is not my problem"
I dont know ubuntu server, which i mostly use because of livepatch, with unattended upgrades seem to fare better than the rhel deploys that i have done - and the customer never updated. Granted the last is not enterprise but Uni bioinfo servers but still.
Ive worked a couple fortune 500s that used ubuntu. If im using aws ill stick with their distro but most of time im happy with ubuntu. I think distro choice matters less and less. Most of the systems ive run recently have had ansible to configure them or have just run docker containers. Most of the gov contracts iveworked on insisted on red hat but honestly the teams making those decsions seemed the least technically capeable ive worked with and it was just a red tape issue to change distros
I think in fortune 500, it's only fraction that use ubuntu/Debian, as most of marketshare hold by red hat, 95% as I remember last time. Than 3% of windows, less than that is everything else.
Depends on context.
If you want to get a job as a "Linux admin" then Red Hat is basically what you want as a "default". Fedora will give you something you can use at home that's broadly similar. You will need to learn more than just that though.
I work at a big company: most of our customers are using RHEL when they use Linux. There are some customers that use SUSE for SAP workloads, but these are about 10% of all linux VMs.
Started with RHEL years ago, migrated to CentOS to get away from the license fees etc. Have since moved to Amazon Linux since we subsequently migrated everything to AWS.
I work for a well known internet company, and its 98% redhat (or derivative) with some alpine and ubuntu scattered about randomly
Most likely debian or debian-distroless
I once worked in for a small publishing company years ago, circa 2005, where they used CentOS on the desktop and server environments. Deploying a new desktop was as simple as using kickstart. They had their infrastructure down to a science.
My current job is all Ubuntu LTS, my job before that was all CentOS, and my job before that was a mixture of Debian and FreeBSD.
So basically your resume goes backwards... ;)
I work for a big enterprise, we have RHEL on all our Linux servers save for a few that are SuSe for SAP.
My experience in my career has been all RHEL/CentOS. The meat of Linux admin isn't going to hugely change between most distros tho. Different package mgmt, how the network is configured, etc... Spin up an VM, install it from scratch, and just learn those differences.
I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.
But in "regular" environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.
Almost always use Ubuntu in production. Also a bit of Centos at one point.
It really depends. I work for a large company and we use Ubuntu, Oracle, RedHat, and SLES. We were moving from Oracle to Ubuntu but now we are going back to RedHat.
Currently we deploy like this: Ubuntu: PostgreSQL, web servers, some engineering workstations, and big data Oracle & RedHat: web servers, security applications, and network systems
So just having a fundamental understanding of Linux and you will be fine SUSE: SAP and HR software
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