I see all the drama around Red-hat and I still don’t get why companies would use RHEL (or centos when it existed). I was in many companies and CentOS being years behind was awful for any recent application (GPU acceleration, even new CPU had problems with old Linux kernels shipped in CentOS).
Long story short the only time one of the company I worked in considered CentOS it was ditched out due to many problems and not even being devs/researchers friendly.
I hear a lot of Youtube influencers “talking” (or reading the Red-Hat statements) about all the work Red-Hat is doing but I don’t see any. I know I dislike gnome so I don’t care they contribute to that.
What I see though is a philosophy against FOSS. They even did a Microsoft move with CentOS (Embrace, extend, and extinguish). I see corporate not liking sharing and collaborating together but aiming at feeding of technology built as a collective. I am convinced they would love to patent science discovery too. I am pretty sure there is a deep gap in philosophy between people wanting “business-grade” Linux and FOSS community.
If you have concrete examples of Red-Hat added value that cannot be fulfilled by independent experts or FOSS community, I’d really like to hear that.
I’ve worked in two environment where using rhel is common/typical. One was using Centos/ the other RHEL. In both cases you need to understand it from the perspective of middleware.
The Centos place was doing video effects post production. They were using it because it’s a lot easier and saner to orchestrate than Windows. When you’re in the middle of a project using tools that cost tens of thousands of dollars per seat, e.g. nuke https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/nuke#editions per year, you want to know that it’s supported and you are not choosing your operating system on the basis of saving $100 on a licence. From the applications manufacturers point of view, you want very predictable, very stable, very fixed versions so that you are not getting hit with the support requests for changes that you do not have control over.
The RHEL place was a bank. They aren’t interested in the latest trends. They are interested in absolute predictability stability, security certifications and support, especially long term support. RHEL ticks all of those boxes, plus, if you want to run something like oracle or other proprietary applications, you will most likely find it supported on RHEL but unsupported on other distributions.