RHEL's quality assurance and documentation is top-notch. Ubuntu has been improving, but it's not anywhere as good (which makes sense - Red Hat has much more people working on it).

Support is expensive, but worth it. It's not unheard of to get custom kernel patches mere days after you reported an issue.

Well, that and the ecosystem of enterprise software which refuse to run on anything but RHEL.

And Ubuntu's failure to establish their home-grown stuff: Upstart, Unity, Mir, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu Phone, Juju...

That being said, 18.04 is a lot better than 12.04 or 14.04. I'm a Red Hat fan, but I hope Canonical succeeds - the more independent companies there are, the better.

Unless it gets bought by MS

I've never seen Ubuntu used in a large enterprise. Redhat dominates the server market. They offer better certification, support, and a package repository geared towards stability and backporting. The seperate Fedora (new a shiny) from RHEL (old and stable).

Ubuntu doesn't really have that distinction. Shuttleworth is also kind of a character, and it's hard to rely on him keeping Ubuntu fixed on a particular use case. It's been desktop, then mobile/desktop convergence, and now containers and Kuberentes. Think startup vs big business.

Ubuntu is the default base image for Cloud Foundry, so in fact it's pretty widely embedded in enterprise at this point. But it's an implementation detail, rather than a separate line item on the invoice.

Didn’t google use Ubuntu or Debian or something?

Google originally used Red Hat Linux (not RHEL) but migrated to Debian. They are using a custom version of all their stuff so its probably not really even Debian at this point.

Compare: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

With: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Samba/SambaServerGuide

The docs are just that much better. The server packages are much more reliable. If you want specific software versions, and you're not on docker, you get those versions. It's a breeze to sysadmin a centos machine. An Ubuntu machine is a pile of nightmares.

(Also, very few people actually run RHEL with the support package, most run CentOS, which is patch-compatible but has all the trademarks removed.)

Everywhere I've worked in the valley in the past 12 years standardized on CentOS.

You will occasionally run into problems requiring much deeper systems expertise than in a standard Ops or SWE skillset. Red Hat is a practical and economical alternative to hiring kernel hackers yourself.

Openshift.