Yeah it's about support contracts, which covers a lot of services actually such as maintaining security audited package repositories. But most importantly it's about support life cycles you can rely on for a long term investment of time and infrastructure outlays.

For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

They do tend to have a different goal for their intial installation and configuration to consumer distros, with a focus on security and providing tools you will need in an enterprise hosting environment.

> For example, RHEL 10 has a planned support phase out until 2035, with extended support available until 2038.

I wonder if that's 19 Jan 2038. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

RHEL 10 lacks 32-bit x86 packages, so it goes past that date. RHEL 9 support ends before that date.

SLAs, support, LTS services etc...

If you have more than a 100 linux machines you certainly need someone who knows linux to support them. You can either hire a team to do this or hire someone who will manage a support contract with suse/ubuntu/red hat etc.

Support, especially for older releases (which is important for heavily regulated companies that can't upgrade on a dime).

More heavily vetted (i.e. older) kernel and support for every package in their repository.

Guaranteed security hotfixes with some time guarantees.

Training and certification programs.