Looks like this will be the end of the road for RHEL based distros for me... I love using AlmaLinux, always super stable and everything just works (at least for what I use it). I guess the next best option will be SUSE?
I suppose SUSE makes a lot of sense. Until some time ago SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE were related, but not exactly the same. That changed with Leap 15.3, since which openSUSE is now based on the same packages as SLE.
I've been personally using Tumbleweed on my personal devices and it's been great. I've not had a single issue with stability and almost always gotten extremely recent versions of software.
I've also had great experiences with Tumbleweed for the most part, but be careful using ZFS, as it frequently breaks with updates. Probably not something most people use, but it does force me to run Leap on my home server.
My main issue with SUSE is 3rd party support.
For example docker doesn't have an official repo for openSUSE/SUSE, so you are stuck with their outdated version or Podman, which is also outdated.
Isn't 'everything just works' because it is a rebuild of RHEL sources? I don't know how else it claims to have 1:1 ABI compatibility witb RHEL otherwise?
I've used Debian before but always had a disdain for how their packaging works. Dpkg seems completely over engineered (why are there more package states than just installed/not installed?) and the way they package things is just annoying. At random times an install or upgrade asks you questions in a wizard style and they always mess around with the configuration files and directories to the point where I don't even know what's the right way to do it, forcing you to search for the Debian specific way of doing things (which usually ends up with a stackoverflow answer) instead of just being able to use the upstream docs.
Just as a word of warning (because I can't tell if this is satire): NixOS does not provide the same experience as a typical Red Hat or Debian-derived distro. It's a vastly different paradigm where your system (including its configuration, packages, etc.) consists (almost) entirely of the output of a program you write in a functional language.
I think it's phenomenal and worth a try (or multiple; I didn't get it the first or second time but now I wouldn't want to go back to something else). But if you go in expecting a traditional Linux distro, you will be disappointed/confused.
