Noone is switching from RHEL to Ubuntu or Debian. If you're on RHEL it's because you need their ridiculous long support cycle which noone else comes close for.

It's used by people building medical hardware and telescopes, not for website deployments.

Ubuntu offers 10 years which is the same. RH is more entrenched, especially in the US. On the technical side, aside from selinux v/s apparmor, there aren't too many differences between Ubuntu and RHEL. RH has a few more custom offerings on the server side (freeipa, openstack, rhev, gluster, etc.), but those a probably not relevant for most users.

Ubuntu has 5 years of “standard support”, with EOL after 10 years. RHEL has 10 years of “production”, with another 3-5 years of “extended support”.

That's just corporate speak. They are all the same. If you use RHEL after 5 years or after the .5 release, it becomes plainly obvious that it's begging you to pull the plug. It's only half assed security fixes after a few years, no matter where you are. If a customer asks for 13 years, I'm sure Canonical will oblige.

Edit: I'm talking about Ubuntu Pro that is 10 years.

It's that "corporate speak" that wins paid contracts for software that needs to run for a decade or more.

RHEL competitor in the market is Windows, not half supported hobby distros.

Ubuntu PRO is a subscription with 10 year support for Ubuntu main and Universe repos, so more than 10 thousand packages. It's also much cheaper, and comes with more features like kernel live patching.

Ubuntu is not a “hobby distro”. I do not even like Canonical but let’s be real. First, Ubuntu is used as the basis for just a giant fraction of enterprise software in the cloud and in embedded. Second, companies pay Canonical big money for even their managed Kafka offerings and such. Canonical is a legitimate business alternative. They are not peddling 10 year support for the hobbyists.

Ah, that makes sense. As somebody outside the RHEL ecosystem, my main experience is needing to argue that maintaining compatibility with whatever ancient version of gcc ships with the oldest “production” version of RHEL isn’t worth it. (E.g. that it is okay to require C++14 support)

I can't find numbers, but an awful lot of customers are still on RHEL 7 which was released in 2014. It's old but it's way more up to date than Ubuntu 14.04.

I myself only switched (to CentOS Stream 9) last February for my personal servers.

Canonical started that 10 year thing only recently (maybe around 18.04). Also, you need to be on the pro subscription to get updates beyond 5 years. So a more accurate comparison would be 18.04+pro and RHEL 8, accounting for the fact that RHEL 8 is a year newer. Or 22.04 and RHEL 9.

Still on RHEL 7? We upgraded to RHEL 7 from RHEL 6x three months ago :-)

FreeIPA is a compelling differentiator.

I've just started testing the port that recently landed in NixOS.

FreeIPA is nice, if over engineered and fragile. There is nothing preventing Canonical from packaging it, they just don't see enough demand probably, and for the most part, they care about ubuntu clients joining an AD domain, which I think Canonical supports.

Sometimes it's because you're operating a platform for a government entity and they have requirements like 'all OSes are under support contracts'.

It's harder to get reputable support for debian in the south Pacific. RH is damned near the only decent option.

Or compliance certifications. Whomever has the one you need, that's the distro you're going with. And any customer who needs that compliance usually has a boat load of cash.

Microsoft really missed an opportunity for a boatload of cash by not putting out a distro for enterprise and government use. I guess they're making up for it now on Azure.

If you're running some expensive software, the few hundred bucks for a RHEL license doesn't matter at all. Some database licenses easily reach a six figure price per server. Custom built software often runs only on a handful of servers and can then easily reach seven figures per server.

I meant their license free Alma/Rocky Servers.

SuSE offers 10+ years support windows, is also RPM based, and has been the RHEL of Europe really for decades.

But support from the community almost doesnt exist.

Indeed, SuSE is a much more likely alternative than others that are being thrown around.

Fwiw, we moved (are moving) on from RHEL and derivatives to Debian/ Ubuntu servers at $DAYJOB. We were planning on deploying Centos 8 before the Stream debacle came along.

We did... Enterprise ERP systems...

Incorrect, for the longest time the US government only knew how to support linux via RHEL, that is rapidly changing. So if you sold software or services to the US government that was running on linux, your only viable choice was RH. That has started to change, Ubuntu pro is certified for use in the USG and has STIGs, which are hardening requirements for Ubuntu.

Many places would develop on centos or scientific Linux and then when it went into production use RHEL, since they were effectively 1:1 ports. So yea, I imagine there are quite a few orgs who might switch.