I would love for my vendors to support Debian but they won’t. Hell, it was hard enough to get them to update their systems to RHEL7 much less move to a totally different distro.

I wish SUSE were more popular in the U.S.

A significant number of Enterprise-oriented 3rd party vendors directly support SLES with their products. It's possible with the new release of openSUSE 15.3 being a bit-clone of SLES 15sp3 that we'll see an uptick in the general FOSS world, time will tell.

>But I feel for those that don’t want or can’t use Debian based distros.

Why? CentOS was already a terrible choice, artificially slow release compared to RHEL, now you can choose from:

-OracleLinux (pretty good..and no i don't like oracle itself...but the Wallpaper is extremely beautiful..UEK is cool too)

-RHEL (free for up to 16 instances)

-That new one with A

-That Chinese one with the UNIX certification

.....and so on

> -RHEL (free for up to 16 instances)

RHEL is free for up to 16 instances for individuals not working in a team. This is frequently ignored, but it says so crystal clear, black on white, on the developer program terms page: https://developers.redhat.com/terms-and-conditions

> The Individual Developer Subscriptions are unsupported, intended for your individual use in your personal capacity and are not intended or supported for any other purpose. If you are interested in the Red Hat Developer Subscriptions for Teams other terms apply and please contact your Red Hat sales associate.

> [...]

> By accepting the Program Terms, you represent that you are acting on your own personal behalf and not as a representative or on behalf of an entity [...]

True, thanks for clarification.

It's healthy for everyone to have a competition. I want successful Debian even though I'm running CentOS these days.

But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases - many users will list that as a benefit. Even more these days with containerised apps.

>It's healthy for everyone to have a competition

Recompile src-files and exchange a branding is not really what i call "competition"

>I want successful Debian

Debian IS successful.

>But really, it doesn't look like you're in the market for it. Some solutions welcome slow releases

That's not what is said nor meant, if for example RHEL 8.2 was released it took CentOS sometimes up to 6 month to release their 8.2 counterpart, in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1.

But maybe your not in the market of having the latest patch for 3rd party software.

> in the meantime the newest patch (let's say for OracleDB) is just compatible/certified for 8.2, but you sit for 6 month on a centos 8.1.

Is this a real scenario? Can you point to a product officially compatible with CentOS, with a patch released only for rhel 8.2 and ignoring CentOS 8.1?

Yes here an example:

>Minimum supported versions: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2: 4.18.0-193.el8.x86_64 or later

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

>product officially compatible with CentOS,

Ehh, that's the point of CentOS being the same as RHEL...bug for bug

If you pay for Oracle, why would you run on promises? I get that the lag is disappointing, but "compatible with RHEL" is not the same as "compatible with RHEL and distributions that claim compatibility with it".

Look i just said there where problems with that lag, and yes true, if you need a OracleDb you will use OracleLinux and probably OracleHardware (because free support for OracleLinux).

> but "compatible with RHEL" is not the same as "compatible with RHEL and distributions that claim compatibility with it".

That was the promise of CentOS 100% compatible with RHEL bug for bug.