Why not the cloud? The company is in a rural location with a shitty internet connection and 50 users. When initially provisioned there was no internet connection at all!

There’s a lot of stuff which is in the territory of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” and that’s where these distributions sit. That may cover industrial, office, line of business apps, temporarily connected or fully offline systems. Or just stuff you don’t want to piss around with.

Also never underestimate the power of having stuff you don’t have to touch or even go near. When was the last time you got paid monthly to do something once every three years?

This is not the reality for 99,9% of the world. If it is online, you need to patch security vulneralibities. Because your system is not immune to them.

There's stuff out there that is nearing relic status that is still up and running and not patched or supported. Some of it isn't even touching a network so that's fine.

  # dnf install dnf-automatic
  # systemctl enable --now dnf-automatic-install

Do note that what users can use on that, and what system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months. The stability is more for the hardware drivers and things like that, where things are still very iffy because a lot of hardware is actually latest hardware, so not all bugs have been sorted. Infiniband for example is not stable and mainstream at all.

Ubuntu will go through two LTS releases in that time, while you can continue with a single RHEL/CentOS release.

I don't know what "system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months" is about. Infiniband is fine, and typically quite up-to-date in RHEL, but you end up having to deal with the Mellanox nightmare, at least for Nvidia GPU support; roll on RoCM. That area is a good demonstration of the practical evil of proprietary software.

The best examples are perhaps hospitals, and medical equipment. I previously worked with a hospital where the software is only certified to run on RedHat, and where the system is very tightly controlled. A patch can only be deployed in production, if it has parsed testing and staging environments.

I've also read about research projects, where different versions of glibc, would yield different results. In this case I will continue to argue that this is pretty bad for reproducibility and more of a problem with the people doing the science and not underlying operation system.

Errors, bugs, security holes do sometimes make it into rolling releases, and in some environments regressions are catastrophic or deadly.

Personally I tend opposite world view compared to you. Rolling release are great, for a very small niche, such as desktops for office workers or developers in certain industries.

Rocky Linux is self is a great project, because it allows you to have an environment identical, or close to identical, to the RedHat installations that will eventually run test, staging, QA and production environments, but without the cost. I had been skeptical that Rocky Linux would deliver, but I'm very please and happy that they do.

We don't use CentOS or Rocky. Our customers pay for RedHat or SLES. But I can see that someone wants RHEL and don't want to pay for the license and don't want to switch to Ubuntu/Debian or OpenSUSE either. I don't understand that, they are not that expensive for what they are but ... I am a software developer by profession, not an accountant. (I even saw industries paying for Windows Servers or HP UX, the prices were pretty eye-watering; the Linux-based options are either cheaper or at the same level as MS Win which for multi-million Euro company is not THAT much and even can pay off when you need to call support.)

Something also needs to run your Kubernetes, and that can't always be AWS.

I think this is how you make Appimage files that run on all distros (maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong)