RHEL licensing is really disappointing for the low end. I use CentOS for my home lab / self-hosted development setup and there's no way I would switch to RHEL.

RHEL licensing is really disappointing for the low end. I use CentOS for my home lab / self-hosted development setup and there's no way I would switch to RHEL. It doesn't matter because I don't spend any money, but I'll probably swap to Ubuntu next time I re-build my server. Here [1] is an example of what I dislike. That page doesn't explain if a subscription is for 1 host or all my hosts and it doesn't explain if it needs to be renewed annually or if I get a perpetual license after the first year of support. I currently have 11 (extremely light usage) CentOS VMs running, but almost everything is Docker containers. I could likely consolidate it onto a single, bare-metal host if I wanted. It would be worse for me, but I could get a single $800 license instead of $8800 for 11 licenses. It's a moot point though. $800 is already too much for the value I'm getting out of it. I could use the developer program, but I use an issue tracker to track work I do and I back up the whole system nightly. Technically that's production (to me), and I've seen IBM bait and eviscerate someone for licensing using extremely unethical tactics, so I'll never use something that isn't very explicitly free for production. I think RHEL is technically superior to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is a far better product when it comes to support lifecycle, licensing, and support. I can spin up an Ubuntu server and unlimited VMs with the promise of a reasonable lifecycle and the option to click a button and buy support. Where is that in the RedHat world? If RedHat would have released a product like CentOS Stream, but with RHEL branding and a dead simple way to go from a free, community supported version to a paid, commercially supported version then for people like me it makes sense to be the "beta" tester. I think it's a fair trade. Downtime doesn't have a huge impact on me and I'm willing to spend time bug hunting / reporting bugs. TLDR; The licensing is a massive hassle and is a terrible value proposition for small users. You're not winning any mindshare unless it's as simple as Ubuntu makes it. 1. https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-server#?sku=RH00005 https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-ser...