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 :-)