If I was looking for a distro with paid support (a la RHEL/Ubuntu) that's also not incredibly behind bleeding edge (maybe not as bleeding edge as Arch, but also not running patched-to-hell-and-back software like Ubuntu), what are my options?
Thankfully I'm not personally looking for this at the moment, I'm more than happy being my own sysadmin and running anything from Arch to Fedora CoreOS to OpenSUSE on my machines.
afaik, your want of relatively fresh software with few patches excludes pretty much everything there is, except for really niche stuff. All other major options with good commercial support have been mentioned by siblings; I'll add Debian + Freexian to the list.
I wish people would stop recommending Rocky. It's a ticking time bomb IMHO caused by their decision to not play nicely with Red Hat and go for questionable tactics like renting temporary RHEL instances to download premade source packages, instead of working together as RH asked them to do. Anybody reading this, do yourself a favor and use Alma, or skip the RHEL ecosystem altogether if you don't absolutely need it.
Otherwise you're building on an operating system which rebuilds a commercial upstream while explicitly refusing to follow that upstream's rules. IBM has lots of experienced lawyers, as I've heard.
It's also slower at releasing updates, including security updates.
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Sorry SSLy, I can't reply to you directly because I'm rate limited, it's very late here, and I'm not waiting for the rate limit to expire. So here's my reply:
I think previous decisions made by IBM have shown that they're fine at burning some community goodwill for short-term profit. People were called paranoid for worrying about the future of CentOS when it was taken up by Red Hat for "improved maintenance", and look where we are now.
Maybe you're right, but I personally wouldn't want to build anything serious on top of that "maybe". If something happens, lateral migration should theoretically work, of course..
IBM suing Rocky for what they're doing means industry wide crisis about what the FOSS provisions really mean. Their competition would welcome such self sabotage with arms wide open.
Of course they could release the code just for the *GPL packages, but it's an option only slightly less bad socially.
Now, I wonder why there's no one rebuilding Ubuntu Pro like folks are rebuilding RHEL.
Thankfully I'm not personally looking for this at the moment, I'm more than happy being my own sysadmin and running anything from Arch to Fedora CoreOS to OpenSUSE on my machines.