Have a look at CentOS 7, the no-cost binary equivalentish(1) version of RHEL 7. Has long term support. Has familiar package management and administration. I don

Have a look at CentOS 7, the no-cost binary equivalentish(1) version of RHEL 7. Has long term support. Has familiar package management and administration. I don't follow this aspect closely but there was talk of 'software collections' allowing more recent versions of programming languages &c (1)CentOS is compiled from the RHEL source code distributed by RedHat but the checksums for each binary will be different as branding/images are changed to remove copyright material.