The thing in the middle is Community enterprise Operating Systems (CentOS).
(just the upgrade cycle on Fedora would make this almost impossible) I would hate my life if my enterprise decided I had to provide the same uptime and management and stability but had to do so on Fedora. Also, when you call Enterprise Database for support, they won't laugh you off the phone because you're using one of their supported platforms.Īs an administrator running business critical applications, this is the platform I want to use. That Enterprise Database 11g rac installed on there is going to continue to operate from when it was installed until RHEL6 goes off the end of it's lifecycle. RHEL6 today operates in almost the exact same way as RHEL6 from 5 years ago. Red Hat continues to publish updates for RHEL6.
For example, if the company bought a piece of software that was certified to run on RHEL6, you can still, today, download and run RHEL6. Add to that, a 10 year lifecycle for things like support and updates, and this is a much more approachable platform for people that need longevity and stability in their infrastructure.
With major releases every several years and minor update releases every 12-18 months, the platform has much more longevity than Fedora.
Fedora has 'spins', one of my favorites is the Fedora Games Spin, it has a whole bunch of Linux games already installed on it, so you can just load and go with it.Įnter, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora also does not offer any type of commercial support, so if it breaks, you get to keep all the pieces. While this newness is great for people who always want the latest and greatest stuff, it is not so great for people who need to support and maintain a platform for software that may not evolve as rapidly. systemd), and countless other packages that could behave differently than their earlier counterparts in previous versions. In addition to an updated kernel (which granted, is a fairly slowly evolving software), you're getting updated programming libraries and languages, system managment software (e.g. Realize that these are not necessarily trivial updates. So with Fedora, you're upgrading your system every 6 - 12 months. You will need to updgrade your system to Fedora 28 or Fedora 29 in order to keep maintaining the machine. This means that if you are on Fedora 27 (Current is Fedora 28), when Fedora 29 is released, you'll no longer get updates produced for your Fedora 27 system. However, every 6 months, there is a newer version of Fedora being published and after 2 releases, Fedora stops producing updates for releases. Yes, Fedora is the 'upstream' for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Beyond the technological differences between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there are a variety of philosophical differences between them.