Prior to going to cloud (ubuntu ended up being easier there even over paid RHEL) on-prem a lot of businesses are just structured around having a vendor, which basically means someone to call to both figure out what to use (unfortunately often dealing with sales folks) and then when issues come up (support / implementation consulting etc).

Given margins are often so good on subscription models in a redhat type world, I really wish they had gone a bit heavier on cloud focus (AWS / GCP / Windows in my case). Some free / base images container / vm focused pushed hard for everything from docker to cloud.

I thought ubuntu executed very well here (given their commercialization has always felt somewhat weak). They got images for docker / aws / gcp all first class and available at the basic level. They are also doing some deals with Microsoft and Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Not sure if anyone has done the docker image download weighted by base distribution analysis, but my own experience went from the centos / rhel was like everywhere to ubuntu and amazon's linux stuff.