>A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I work for a Fortune 50 and we're one

>A bunch of companies think that's somehow better to have that than to hire people to support general-use distributions. I work for a Fortune 50 and we're one of those companies that made that decision. Having someone to call when things go south is worth every penny. It's not that you can't hire completely competent people to deal with any issue, it's just outsourcing the staffing and expertise needed to do it globally is IMHO cheaper. Even if you have a large company you're still probably gonna have a kernel guy and a filesystem guy and some CEPH guys who are all familiar with the code base. Redhat has a phalanx of people in their employ both contributing code to upstream projects and backporting features to their version of Linux. There's a whole room of kernel guys, filesystem guys, etc, etc, etc. Hiring and keeping that bench of talent happy is someone else's problem when you buy Redhat. >I've had quite a bit of experience with Debian and Debian-derived distributions, a little experience with CentOS 8. I heavily disapprove of CentOS based on this experience and see it as not just restrictive, but also kind of flaky and shaky. CentOS 8 may be "flaky and shaky", dunno... haven't used it. But RHEL 5, 6, and 7 have been rock solid in my experience. If anything Redhat was too conservative and I was delighted to see Redhat adopt a different and much more aggressive patch and update lifecycle for RHEL 8. But moving faster does sometimes break things as the mantra for HN will tell you.