That’s fine if you’re OK relying on their packages and 3rd party “enterprise” software that’s “certified” for the release. No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.
The most annoying to me was that RHEL6 was still under support and had an ancient kernel that excluded running Go, GRaalVM, etc. static binaries. No epoll() IIRC.
Often times you find yourself having to pull more and more libraries into a build. It all starts with wanting a current Python and before you know it you’re bringing in your own OpenSSL.
And they have no problem changing their system management software in patch releases. They’ve changed priority of config files too many times. But that’s another rant for another day.
This is a place where I wish some BSD won out. With all the chunks of the base userspace + kernel each moving in their own direction it’s impossible to get out of this place. Then add in every permutation of those pieces from the distros.
Multiple kernel versions * multiple libc implementations * multiple inits * …
I’d never try to make binary-only software for Linux. Dealing with packaging OSS is bad enough.
glances nervously at my corporate-issued ThinkPad running RHEL 8
I worked somewhere where we ran CentOS on the desktop. That seemed to work pretty well. I don't see why RHEL would be any worse, apart from being more expensive.
This came with some changes to open up the developer license program for RHEL so that it could be used for small scale production workloads.
The big problem was that the latter was only hinted at by the time the CentOS EOL was announced and didn't get spelled out in precise language for a few more months, which led to a lot of very angry sysadmins who had been using CentOS in production franticly searching for a new platform in the meantime.
As a result, new rebuild distributions spun up to fill in CentOS Linux's role in the ecosystem as bug-for-bug clones.
CentOS Linux 7 is and will still be maintained until the mid-2024 EOL of RHEL 7.
Err.... yes we do? It's a development base I know isn't going to change for a long time, and I can always flatpak whatever applications I need. Hell, now that RHEL 9 includes pipewire I put it on my DAW/DJ laptop.
Even Apple doesn't make that level of "unbreakable contract" commitment. Apple will announce deprecations of APIs with two or three years of opportunity to fix them. If apps don't upgrade within the timeframe, they just stop working in newer versions of macOS.
Are there any distros that treat their public APIs as an unbreakable contract with developers like what MS does?