Governments also prefer Redhat because they early on and continuing today have shown a commitment to the market by investing in getting their products certified to meet government required standards including developing the required capabilities when not already available in the Linux ecosystem, developing documentation and software to assist deploying systems in a manner consistent with government security requirements and participating in conferences, working groups, interoperability tests and other government targeted or sponsored forums.

Some other Linux vendors now also do so but started much later and even now do so to a much lesser degrees.

We have our LTSS -> Long term support at SUSE. Just in case you're a big government that wants to throw us lots of money.

Off-topic, but what’s you experience working at Suse? I know a former employee, and what he told me sounded hellish.

I'm an Ex-SUSE employee, and I quite enjoyed it - since I left a few years ago, I don't think there's been any turnover in my group since.

I know two people who work or recently used to work at Suse and they liked it quite a bit.

I love it. Not that it doesn't have it's issues. I've been here 10 years now though.

I don't know about the gobbles of cash, but I'm pretty sure Canonical supports Ubuntu releases way past EOL for paying customers - they call it the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance), which 'provides important security fixes for the kernel and the most essential user space packages in Ubuntu'.

Depends on your definition of support I suppose. Redhat employs so many more low level engineers they can generally get you a z stream patch or something to fix a legitimate bug. Canonical is an exceptional marketing company, but I've found their engineering to be lacking when it comes to enterprise. As someone who's worked as a linux monkey for companies who pay Canonical for support and for companies who pay Redhat for support, I've always found the Redhat support to actually solve the root cause. When we filed what we thought were legitimate bugs with Canonical, the common response was just to "upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu". When we asked them to confirm that doing so actually fixed our problems we just got crickets.

It tends to also be in the opposite direction, big expensive enterprise software is supported on redhat forever and ever. And the issue isn’t just security updates, but full software and hardware support for the same stack for many years.

Lots of people don’t want to recreate their stack every few years for the latest cool thing.

Ubuntu ESM is 8 years, significantly shorter than RedHat's 12 year maximum.

Pretty much this, they know how the game is played and they play it.