RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they're all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you'll be good.
Depends on context.
If you want to get a job as a "Linux admin" then Red Hat is basically what you want as a "default". Fedora will give you something you can use at home that's broadly similar. You will need to learn more than just that though.
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Debian.
All of my personal servers are Debian. My last company switched their entire production fleet from centos to Debian. I think a lot of people switched to Debian back when the Centos Stream debacle went down.
To tag onto this, what makes RHEL so special? Is it just the support you get from Red Hat or is there something about the distro that makes it so widely used?
Beyond support agreements that others are mentioning, the huge requirement for the shop I work at (mid-scale high performance computing center) it’s 3rd party vendor package support. Mellanox/nvidia, whamcloud, slurm, vast, and on and on. Driver packages targeting rhel kernels are an industry standard offering if a vendor supports linux. That’s not always the case with Debian variants, for instance.
Same with huge applications and proprietary compiler suites (think matlab and the intel compiler suite or OneAPI). These are hugely important packages for a number of shops.
Don’t get me wrong, I can build against plenty of other distros but my vendors target rhel as a first class citizen for both build scripts and straight binary packaging.
The support is a huge part of it. Being able to submit a ticket or call in to get help with a strange quirk is extremely valuable to a lot of companies. Additionally, having a licensed distribution like this means there’s built in trust. Red Hat has been a big player in this space forever and are well trusted already, too. So there’s a huge community of people who have used the product to talk to or hire. They also have certifications for rhel, supported by Red Hat, and those carry weight in the industry to some degree.
Support contracts for risk mitigation is a big part of it, and the other is RH release engineering is amazing.
Aside from that, RHEL, and clones, is a very straight forward, clean distro. It’s very focused with everything doted and tidy, and overall, it has a very uncomplicated feel to it. In contrast Debian derivatives are kind of messy, and SUSE tries to stuff every function into a single application.
RHEL does push a lot of technology. Out of the stable distros, it will be the first to put tech into production. RH does a lot with integration with other systems. This has kept me off of SUSE in the past. RHEL was more tech forward, comparatively.
dnf downgrade
dnf history undo
dnf history redo
it's very very very critical for most case :')
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It is 100% the support. Corporations pay big money to have experts on call to fix things fast when they break, and there's basically no other player for that kind of model in the Linux space.
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I once worked in for a small publishing company years ago, circa 2005, where they used CentOS on the desktop and server environments. Deploying a new desktop was as simple as using kickstart. They had their infrastructure down to a science.
I hope I can get my company to go linux. But for now I can only use it for myself. But i'm quietly pushing :)
I'd suggest RedHat and SUSE as well.
Company I'm at runs Windows server. Kill me.
Oh dear god
I work for a well known internet company, and its 98% redhat (or derivative) with some alpine and ubuntu scattered about randomly
Mostly mission critical server that I deployed in the past, all use RHEL/Clones because their LTS, and stability across packages version.
If for hobbyist, it's Ubuntu. I think you need to learn more about ansible, container/podman/openshift, and SDN for work. Nowdays, there are some use APT in production, but mostly they switch to dnf because dnf have better way to do downgrade, undo, redo, and config package in production.
This applied mostly for ERP project such as SAP Hanna, SQL Server, DB2, etc... Like it not, Red Hat Dwindling isn't now, probably 5-10 years ahead, but I'm not sure, as mostly rant about RHEL are in Community. I do know regional linux user group in Indonesia, some are leaving EL group, but they still can't rip apart most mission critical server on top of RHEL/Clones... so it's still worth learning RHEL/Clones, and use Fedora for day 2 day task, and learn ubuntu, as well ubuntu pro, for learn deploying critical production server.
Debian and Ubuntu are near, and ubuntu is derived from debian, but if you talk spirit, they are different... If you are conscious about what Red Hat do, stay away from it, but if you are working in corporate, you can't go without learning it.
Almost always use Ubuntu in production. Also a bit of Centos at one point.
C'est vrai, same for me
Nobody said Alpine? Youre debugging k8s containers your gonna find Alpine, Ubuntu/Debian and CentOS.
Once you know package managers and basic images you're gonna be able to get what you need.
i dont get why people do not just use debian. especially if they got their own it person / support
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
Debian consultancy never near RHEL, that's why they need to work hard on that, and make industry standard.
Red Hat drive the industry standard for more than 20 years... That make every Corp lean to it, and it won't dwindling soon.. Unless other are making Debian standardized.
Ubuntu tried it, still not even taking chunk I guess? Mostly Enterprise is RHEL/Clones.
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
that is just corp talk for "it is not my problem"
I dont know ubuntu server, which i mostly use because of livepatch, with unattended upgrades seem to fare better than the rhel deploys that i have done - and the customer never updated. Granted the last is not enterprise but Uni bioinfo servers but still.
Nah, it's not fully about corp talk. I also have some University use RHEL, well, I would argue, in university, some do use ubuntu because it easiness to install and maintain, welp... But selinux vs apparmor... better use selinux in EL than in Ubuntu... haha.... *most junior sysadmin fvk tup in Ubuntu when set it up... so In the end they just use... Well,, EL Clones :/
But for research, I do agree, for NLP/ML, mostly I don't see any EL Clones deployed in labs, most Prof use Ubuntu and Nvidia drivers... Scientific linux is well known then centOS stream, just they still don't budge to move.. this is hard to crack question, I never know why no EL, but I guess because ubuntu nvidia prefered driver done its best, better than CentOS/Fedora
It really depends. I work for a large company and we use Ubuntu, Oracle, RedHat, and SLES. We were moving from Oracle to Ubuntu but now we are going back to RedHat.
Currently we deploy like this: Ubuntu: PostgreSQL, web servers, some engineering workstations, and big data Oracle & RedHat: web servers, security applications, and network systems
So just having a fundamental understanding of Linux and you will be fine SUSE: SAP and HR software
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The two distros I've seen in the workplace most often were Redhat (because support contracts can be purchased) and Ubuntu (because AWS and Digital Ocean treat Ubuntu VMs as first-class citizens).
If you want to learn more than one distro, try setting up Docker containers for various services. The base distros in the containers use the same commands as on the base metal
My experience in my career has been all RHEL/CentOS. The meat of Linux admin isn't going to hugely change between most distros tho. Different package mgmt, how the network is configured, etc... Spin up an VM, install it from scratch, and just learn those differences.
I work at a big company: most of our customers are using RHEL when they use Linux. There are some customers that use SUSE for SAP workloads, but these are about 10% of all linux VMs.
Not Linux but there are still a of Unix System V systems out there too. AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. Harder to learn as very much not open source software (although there is the Illumos project with distros like OpenIndiana).
Wow, last time I managed HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and Irix, was last century...
Unfortunately AIX in particular is very much still in use in my industry. Its slowly being phased out but is very much still there.
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Ive worked a couple fortune 500s that used ubuntu. If im using aws ill stick with their distro but most of time im happy with ubuntu. I think distro choice matters less and less. Most of the systems ive run recently have had ansible to configure them or have just run docker containers. Most of the gov contracts iveworked on insisted on red hat but honestly the teams making those decsions seemed the least technically capeable ive worked with and it was just a red tape issue to change distros
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I'm seeing a lot of very interesting answers but I'm wondering what you mean by "production environment".
Do you mean VFX Production? (English not my first language so if "production" is used in different industries, well, I didn't know).
I'm new to the industry and worked for small companies that don't use Linux. But my VFX peeps use Rocky, Mint, and Ubuntu ( stronger preference for Rocky in studios).
In IT in the US, "production" is commonly used to refer to systems that support actual business operations. In other words, it's as opposed to "development" or "testing" systems.
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In this context production means servers or machines which make money in a business. The partner term is normally staging: a testbed environment.
I think Ubuntu is the most popular distro in the cloud, at least based on cloud provider metrics. Dockerhub shows like 30 million downloads a week for it regularly, which is a lot compared to most images. Debian would be good to learn as that's what Ubuntu is based on and all the major software with will probably target it. Alpine is good to learn as it's super slim, tends to be used for containers a lot.
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My current job is all Ubuntu LTS, my job before that was all CentOS, and my job before that was a mixture of Debian and FreeBSD.
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At work: Alpine-based docker containers. Flatcar Container Linux for host VMs.
Personally: Ubuntu Server. Some alpine docker containers.
A company I worked at 2016-2022 used mainly CentOS and Ubuntu for all their servers at customers' sites
I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.
But in "regular" environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.
So what are the biggest differences. Or is it mostly the same? Also thanks for the responses!
Most Linux distros are more alike than different. They'll use different package managers, have different sets of software available, have different default settings for some stuff, but at the end of the day, Linux is Linux. Once you know enough, the distro is almost meaningless in terms of what you're capable of. You can do almost anything on any distro with the right knowledge and a bit of effort. It mostly becomes about the effort at that point.
Skills you learn on one will be 98% transferrable to another. That's why everybody says to just get Red Hat certifications; not because Red Hat has a monopoly, but because their certification process is fantastic, respected and accepted almost anywhere regardless of what they actually run. As you've seen, almost every answer you got was completely different on what they actually run in production.
The only standout differences are the newish trend of immutable distros (openSUSE ALP/Aeon, Fedora Kinoite/Silver blue, etc) and NixOS, which is also immutable but its own beast entirely. These have some new considerations separate from the rest, especially NixOS. But they're still relatively fresh on the scene, so there's no rush to learn about them just yet.
Mostly cost. We used to run a lot of Oracle databases and they have become extremely expensive to keep running. So we are migrating to PostgreSQL. The servers were getting migrated to CentOS but now that RedHat fucked that distro we are going back to RedHat. Part of that deal is switching from chef to Ansible. So to save costs we are consolidating to a single vendor.
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