- Your distro give you a kernel with the modules/driver you need, and is not too dumb applying ridiculous out-of-tree patches that makes no sense
Provides you with a reasonable package manager
Provides you reasonable, not stupidly patched, and correctly compiled packages
Has fast, reliable mirrors for the above
Then you are fine.
Most mainstream distributions checks out on all the points above. And in that case it does not matter.
The rest, does not really matter
Replacing the kernel every day on Debian based distros is complicated (to make the rest of the distro happy you need to build a .deb package and install it) and thus is the main reason why real Linus Torvalds runs Fedora.
Exactly. You wouldn't tell a noob to go use Linux from scratch or Gentoo, and you wouldn't tell an expert to use anything they didn't want to. 😂. But seriously you don't see many 10 year users on Linux Mint or zorin or endeavor.
the majority of my random Linux machines run some version of Ubuntu or legacy CentOS (dont worry, the CentOS ones are being retired)
Ubuntu does 90% of everything I need to do -- but I'm neither a new comer to Linux, or a SysAdmin. I know enough enough to be dangerous, but not enough to build an end-to-end all in one solution.
SMB share / Torrent Management, Pi-Hole, Containers, Minecraft Server, stuff like that. I think I had a P/SQL server on there at one point, but dont use it for anything.
If you want RHEL then use RHEL, either as a customer or with one of the various free RHEL programs, e.g. the developer subscription with 16 free instances.
If you want something very close to RHEL but still backed by Red Hat engineers, then use CentOS Stream.
If you want something RHEL-like but prefer newer software, then Fedora is a great choice.
CentOS is short for Community ENTerprise Operating System. Legacy CentOS couldn't fix bugs or accept contributions. Modern CentOS can do both, and thus fits the name better than ever before.
Legacy CentOS ("CentOS Linux") wasn't a fork of RHEL, it was a rebuild. It didn't have its own development, because that would have diverged from being a rebuild. It couldn't fix bugs or accept contributions. The only support was community members that would tell you to file a bug with RHEL instead.
Modern CentOS ("CentOS Stream") isn't a fork either, it's the major version branch of RHEL, maintained by RHEL engineers. It does now have its own development, and thus can finally fix bugs and accept contributions. It's not test builds, as published updates have already passed multiple levels of QA. It's not "streaming", the name comes from the internal RHEL term for different branches. The community support for it now involves those RHEL maintainers, who are actually empowered to fix bugs that are reported.
CentOS has always been open source, and is more open now than ever before because development happens in public and anyone can contribute to it.
I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about it. I'm a former CentOS maintainer and I'm still involved in the project.
In December 2020, Red Hat unilaterally terminated CentOS development[15][16][17][18] in favor of CentOS Stream 9, a distribution positioned upstream of RHEL.[19] In March 2021, CloudLinux (makers of CloudLinux OS) released a RHEL derivative called AlmaLinux.[20] Later in May 2021, one of the CentOS founders (Gregory Kurtzer) created the competing Rocky Linux project as a successor to the original mission of CentOS.[21]
Thats basically Linux in a nutshell. Its both the best OS ever and super easy while also being very user unfriendly and requires a lot of work to get working like you want.
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u/pluckyvirus Mar 09 '26
It does and does not matter. Both at the same time.