AFAIK the only reason people pay for RHEL licensing is they want commercial support. If you just like the distro, then CentOS is perfect.

(I do prefer Debian but that's mainly from getting started with Linux on Ubuntu).

There aren't too many choices if you need to deploy something important in the most boring, reliable and maintainable fashion.

I'm not a "fan" of CentOS like I'm not a fan of Toyota Hilux vehicles but both have their merits.

You make the comparison to the Hilux... and there are some HUGE fans of the Hilux specifically because it is extraordinarily reliable. Makes me wonder why there isn't a well known "boring, reliable" distro of Debian[1]... would Toyota mind if "Debian Hilux" were to come into being?

[1] I'm fairly certain there are distros derived from Debian which could be a "Hilux distro" but they aren't well-known to me.

Isn't Debian Stable the Hilux distro?

Are there LTS releases supported as long as CentOS?

(That's not rhetorical -- I honestly don't know.)

No, RHEL/CentOS aim for an absurd 10-year lifecycle, whereas Debian, even with LTS, is aiming for 5 years.

Compare https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/centos and https://endoflife.software/operating-systems/linux/debian for exact figures.

If you want stability on bare metal servers without having to pay the RedHat license then CentOS is the way to go. I've using to work with lots of bare metal servers and we used to run debian on everything until we started to have issues with kernel panics on machines we used with xen. We changed a few machines to CentOS and never looked back, in a spam of a few months we migrated all servers to CentOS and had much less stability issues. Not to say that debian isn't very stable as well, but RedHat puts money and effort into making their distro run on various enterprise level hardware.

False dichotomy. I use CentOS because RHEL is the best Linux distro for me AND I don't have to pay for it.

What makes RHEL the best distro for you?

CentOS/Redhat used to be a classic Unix server version (up to around CentOS 6) and most sysadmins using it didn't care about alsa/pulseaudio/X/Gnome/usb/hotplug. systemd changed that, and CentOS is pretty weird now.

Ubuntu was a notebook-focused end-user distro. Not sure what it is in 2020.

If you never used early Linux or Unix distros, then Ubuntu might seem normal and you wouldn't notice the differences that I'm referring to.

People pay for Redhat if they're using commercial software and want support, like ERP software. The reason for that is since Linux doesn't have an Application Binary Interface (ABI) standard, commercial vendors can only support specific versions.

Top500 cluster owners were pissed when Redhat started charging per server and wouldn't give them a break, despite operating clusters of thousands of cookie-cutter servers.

I forget if I wrote a post on how shitty Linux is compared to any other OS, but the missing ABI and horrific help/man/info situations would be top of the list.

(You know if you're a linux expert and not a fanboi when you can list 10 things that linux completely sucks at.)

It's stable, supported for ages, they backport security fixes, they have a decent kernel team.

I use CentOS because it is Fedora with a slightly slower upgrade cycle. I've been using Fedora since it was called Red Hat Linux and I paid for a boxed set of CDs. Stability is nice.

I mean, yes, that's clearly the intention behind the distribution. As someone who works with RHEL everyday, why wouldn't I choose CentOS for my personal projects?

What would you recommend instead for servers? Debian?

What do you recommend? And why?