What is enterprise operating system anyway?
* immediate support (have someone you can call 24/7 if your system blows up)
* responsive support (have engineers on staff to close support tickets fairly quickly. This applies especially to bugfixes)
* good QA process so that you do not use your enterprise customers as free QA but pay people to test the product thoroughly before releasing it. This ties into the notion of long term support as something that stays in the QA matrix and receives bugfixes/updates.
* good documentation, in multiple languages
* A supporting ecosystem of certifications/training materials, so a business can hire people qualified to use the product
All of the above boils down to having people on staff doing all the boring, costly things that reduce the pain of companies using the software. Those things are not fun, so they tend not to happen consistently by open source volunteers, so they have to be paid for, hence "enterprise", as end users don't value these enough to pay for them over free but big businesses do.
How about "Don't say at release time that you'll support something for 10 years, and then change your mind a year later and say that you'll be dropping support in a year?"
(Yeah, I'm still not over that)
Stuff that a typical desktop user probably won't run or use. Maybe they can if they really wanted to, but not the common use case.
>Is Windows not "enterprise"?
Funny you ask when Microsoft literally sells a version of Windows called "Windows Enterprise". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare
Find the differences between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Enterprise and that may help you understand what makes Rocky Linux also enterprise.
Red Hat target RHEL to a conservative, enterprise audience who look for a long lived well supported operating system, Rocky (and CentOS before it) court the same audience.
The primary difference being that RHEL is a premium product differentiated by the Red Hat support, training and documentation offering.
Support in so far as Red Hat will work with you to troubleshoot your OS issues, and issue custom patches to the packages they supply that you’re encountering issues with etc etc.
Training in that Red Hat offer many training courses and certifications in the usage and deployment of their many software packages and collections (System Administration, Troubleshooting & Diagnosis, High Availability Cluster administration etc etc)
If you look at Microsoft’s offering for Windows server you’ll see many parallels in the offerings that Red Hat present.
* A software stack that large third-party vendors of software and hardware are willing to certify their products against, e.g. SAP, databases, etc.
* Support contracts