What's so good about RHEL/fedora vs debian or ubuntu server, say?
I assume their support is good also, but I haven't used that.
For me though, I have a bunch of servers running CentOS just because it's extremely solid and stable. The price you pay is that all your packages are a little old, but there are repos to get new software, so I can be on the newest Postgres and Node etc.
Can you point me to the Debian developer who will give me follow the sun support on a problem that could be with the J2EE container, the OS, the virt layer, or the hardware, and has support arrangements with the vendors of all those things so they don't just sit around finger pointing?
Can you point me at the J2EE container Canonical supply?
b. Yes Canonical has follow the sun support for the "Main" section of Ubuntu. This includes the OS, the virt layer and the hardware along with relationships with the hardware vendors.
c. No Ubuntu doesn't do enterprise J2EE The only open source solution is TomCat and as you know they won't co-operate with other distributions.
Insofar as competition in this space, SLES has been popular in heterogenous environments (a lot of Windows servers). Canonical and Ubuntu are newer competitors on the scene. Companies have been using Red Hat for 20 years, they are pretty good at their jobs.
Also, RHEL is a flagship but Red Hat sells support for other products like JBoss.
Last I checked they make about as much out of the JBoss-branded software as they do out of the platform stuff.
Either that, or pay 80k to Red Hat, who have dozens of kernel developers one of whom probably knows about your issue, and if it turns out not to be the kernel probably have someone on staff that can investigate that as well. Worst case they know who to contact upstream to dig deeper into your issue.
Take Google, for example. They don't pay Red Hat because they have the code and they have amazingly smart kernel developers. But that's (surprisingly) still good for Red Hat, since Red Hat benefits from the contributions to the kernel that Google makes. It's good for all users of Linux.
It's mostly just a matter of personal taste / preference. I use both Ubuntu and Fedora/CentOS and there's not really any huge functional differences. For a long time, years ago, people argued that apt was a much better tool than yum, which may have been true at one time. But for quite some time now I've found yum to be equal to or superior to apt. Of course, Fedora has moved to dnf now, where dnf is a more modern, drop-in replacement (mostly anyway) for yum.
For me, I tend to stick mostly with the RH derived distros just out of familiarity. I've been using Red Hat Linux (and derivatives) since RH 6.2 was out, and I know it better than I know Debian or Ubuntu or Slackware or whatever.
Same reason many people using SUSE Linux.
- Support
- SLA
- Familiarity and continuity
Sure business can pay for Debian enterprise support too, but its slightly different mindset when the whole ecosystem was made for business and enterprise.
It is required for support for certain products on linux, like Oracle. Also, RHEL is tested with various distributed filesystems, etc.