this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I have not the slightest idea why companies use Red Hat. When people think this is how Linux is, no wonder they think Linux sucks.
I have to use Red Hat and I cannot stop thinking about how much more professional Debian appears to me. They can at least make decent packages that work properly.
First-mover advantage, combined with a long tail of support and the cost of migrating to a new platform.
RedHat was, for a VERY long time, the only real commercially supported Linux with SLAs and long-term roadmaps and backported security patches: and yes, Debian does those, but they don't offer any sort of guarantees that corpo management types really really like.
It was also one of the only (that I can remember aside from maybe SUSE - maaaybe Slack?) actually putting their distro in stores back in the 90s. I was a middle schooler and used Christmas money to buy RedHat at Best Buy (I had no idea what I was doing) because I thought it was the distro to get. I can't remember a single other distro more synonymously associated with Linux than RedHat because they were marketed hard and were widely available for purchase which I'm guessing made them at least appear more legitimate to new Linux consumer and business adopters.
SuSE was kinda in some retail stores but mostly only really the ones that were mostly exclusively computer-related (at least in the states). But RedHat was EVERYWHERE: book stores, computer stores, electronics stores, and hell even my college bookstore had it.
They really did make impressive inroads in selling Linux, even if they did decide to bail out after 9 and moved from consumer to corporate focused.
From my experience, I'll rather pay for a Linux consultant than for regular commercial support. They give me solid results and join my teams when they have something to do. And consultants seem to prefer Debian-based distributions, when I ask them directly.
Me too, and I hate Debian, too! But I'll always pick a deb-based distro over an rpm-based one. Maybe rpm has improved over the years, but I'll never forgive them the years of dependency hell I suffered through with them. dpkg is miles better, and even that pales in comparison to any rolling upgrade distro.