Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) logo

Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

CentOS, Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and what are its top alternatives?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the industry-leading Linux that provides the foundation for next-generation architectures, with support for all major hardware platforms and thousands of commercial and custom applications.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a tool in the Operating Systems category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

  • CentOS
    CentOS

    The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code. ...

  • Oracle Linux
    Oracle Linux

    The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more informati... ...

  • Ubuntu
    Ubuntu

    Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers. ...

  • Fedora
    Fedora

    Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system. ...

  • Debian
    Debian

    Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software. ...

  • Kali Linux
    Kali Linux

    It is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. It contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering. ...

  • Linux
    Linux

    A clone of the operating system Unix, written from scratch by Linus Torvalds with assistance from a loosely-knit team of hackers across the Net. It aims towards POSIX and Single UNIX Specification compliance. ...

  • Alpine Linux
    Alpine Linux

    Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox. ...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alternatives & related posts

CentOS logo

CentOS

13.5K
8.8K
53
The Community ENTerprise Operating System
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+ 1
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PROS OF CENTOS
  • 16
    Stable
  • 9
    Free to use
  • 9
    Reliable
  • 6
    Has epel packages
  • 6
    Good support
  • 5
    Great Community
  • 2
    I've moved from gentoo to centos
CONS OF CENTOS
  • 1
    Yum is a horrible package manager

related CentOS posts

Marcel Kornegoor

Since #ATComputing is a vendor independent Linux and open source specialist, we do not have a favorite Linux distribution. We mainly use Ubuntu , Centos Debian , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora during our daily work. These are also the distributions we see most often used in our customers environments.

For our #ci/cd training, we use an open source pipeline that is build around Visual Studio Code , Jenkins , VirtualBox , GitHub , Docker Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine.

For #ServerConfigurationAndAutomation, we have embraced and contributed to Ansible mainly because it is not only flexible and powerful, but also straightforward and easier to learn than some other (open source) solutions. On the other hand: we are not affraid of Puppet Labs and Chef either.

Currently, our most popular #programming #Language course is Python . The reason Python is so popular has to do with it's versatility, but also with its low complexity. This helps sysadmins to write scripts or simple programs to make their job less repetitive and automating things more fun. Python is also widely used to communicate with (REST) API's and for data analysis.

See more
Shared insights
on
UbuntuUbuntuOpenStackOpenStackCentOSCentOS
at

Hello guys

I am confused between choosing CentOS7 or centos8 for OpenStack tripleo undercloud deployment. Which one should I use? There is another option to use OpenStack, Ubuntu, or MicroStack.

We wanted to use this deployment to build our home cloud or private cloud infrastructure. I heard that centOS is always the best choice through a little research, but still not sure. As centos8 from Redhat is not supported for OpenStack tripleo deployments anymore, I had to upgrade to CentosStream.

See more
Oracle Linux logo

Oracle Linux

105
105
3
Leading enterprise and SMB SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM & CX, with best-in-class database PaaS & IaaS...
105
105
+ 1
3
PROS OF ORACLE LINUX
  • 1
    Has a Enterprise variant
  • 1
    Good for server systems
  • 1
    Many installation choices
CONS OF ORACLE LINUX
  • 1
    Not many average users use it

related Oracle Linux posts

Ubuntu logo

Ubuntu

76.8K
56.5K
468
The leading OS for PC, tablet, phone and cloud
76.8K
56.5K
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PROS OF UBUNTU
  • 230
    Free to use
  • 96
    Easy setup for testing discord bot
  • 57
    Gateway Linux Distro
  • 54
    Simple interface
  • 9
    Don't need driver installation in most cases
  • 6
    Open Source
  • 6
    Many active communities
  • 3
    Software Availability
  • 3
    Easy to custom
  • 2
    Many flavors/distros based on ubuntu
  • 1
    Lightweight container base OS
  • 1
    Great OotB Linux Shell Experience
CONS OF UBUNTU
  • 5
    Demanding system requirements
  • 4
    Adds overhead and unnecessary complexity over Debian
  • 2
    Snapd installed by default
  • 1
    Systemd

related Ubuntu posts

Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
at

We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

See more
John Calandra
Data Manager at The Garrett Group · | 8 upvotes · 354.5K views

There is a question coming... I am using Oracle VirtualBox to spawn 3 Ubuntu Linux virtual machines (VM). VM1 is being used as a data lake - just a place to store flat files. VM2 hosts Apache NiFi. VM3 hosts PostgreSQL. I have built a NiFi pipeline that reads flat files on VM1 and then pipes the data over to and inserts it into the Postgresql database. I left this setup alone for a while, and then something hiccupped on VM3, and I had to rebuild it. Now I cannot make a remote connection to Postgresql on VM3. I was using pgAdmin3 on VM3, but it kept throwing errors - I found out it went end-of-life in 2018 and uninstalled it. pgAdmin4 is out, but for some reason, I cannot get the APT utility to find/install it. I am trying to figure out the pgAdmin4 install problem and looking for a good alternative for pgAdmin4 that I can use to diagnose the remote database connection problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

See more
Fedora logo

Fedora

606
497
88
Operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project
606
497
+ 1
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PROS OF FEDORA
  • 21
    Great for developers
  • 10
    Great integration with system tools
  • 10
    Represents the future of rhel/centos
  • 9
    Good release schedule
  • 7
    Reliable
  • 6
    Fast
  • 5
    Docker integration
  • 4
    Has SeLinux
  • 3
    Latest packages
  • 3
    Updated with Bleeding-edge software
  • 3
    Great for ops teams
  • 3
    Awesome community
  • 2
    Python distribution
  • 2
    Complies with International Standard
CONS OF FEDORA
  • 3
    Bugs get fixed slowly from kernel side
  • 2
    Much less support from Wiki
  • 2
    Systemd
  • 2
    Boring
  • 1
    Less packages in official repository
  • 1
    A bit complicated
  • 1
    Learning curve for new users
  • 0
    Slightly difficult to install for beginners

related Fedora posts

Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
at

We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

See more
Marcel Kornegoor

Since #ATComputing is a vendor independent Linux and open source specialist, we do not have a favorite Linux distribution. We mainly use Ubuntu , Centos Debian , Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora during our daily work. These are also the distributions we see most often used in our customers environments.

For our #ci/cd training, we use an open source pipeline that is build around Visual Studio Code , Jenkins , VirtualBox , GitHub , Docker Kubernetes and Google Compute Engine.

For #ServerConfigurationAndAutomation, we have embraced and contributed to Ansible mainly because it is not only flexible and powerful, but also straightforward and easier to learn than some other (open source) solutions. On the other hand: we are not affraid of Puppet Labs and Chef either.

Currently, our most popular #programming #Language course is Python . The reason Python is so popular has to do with it's versatility, but also with its low complexity. This helps sysadmins to write scripts or simple programs to make their job less repetitive and automating things more fun. Python is also widely used to communicate with (REST) API's and for data analysis.

See more
Debian logo

Debian

15.6K
10.8K
164
The Universal Operating System
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PROS OF DEBIAN
  • 54
    Massively supported
  • 50
    Stable
  • 21
    Reliable
  • 9
    Aptitude
  • 8
    Customizable
  • 8
    It is free
  • 8
    Turnkey linux use it
  • 6
    Works on all architectures
CONS OF DEBIAN
  • 10
    Old versions of software
  • 2
    Can be difficult to set up on vanilla Debian

related Debian posts

Labinator Team

At labinator.com, we use HTML5, CSS 3, Sass, Vanilla.JS and PHP when building our premium WordPress themes and plugins. When writing our codes, we use Sublime Text and Visual Studio Code depending on the project. We run Manjaro and Debian operating systems in our office. Manjaro is a great desktop operating system for all range of tasks while Debian is a solid choice for servers.

WordPress became a very popular choice when it comes to content management systems and building websites. It is easy to learn and has a great community behind it. The high number of plugins as well that are available for WordPress allows any user to customize it depending on his/her needs.

For development, HTML5 with Sass is our go-to choice when building our themes.

Main Advantages Of Sass:

  • It's CSS syntax friendly
  • It offers variables
  • It uses a nested syntax
  • It includes mixins
  • Great community and online support.
  • Great documentation that is easy to read and follow.

As for PHP, we always thrive to use PHP 7.3+. After the introduction of PHP 7, the WordPress development process became more stable and reliable than before. If you a developer considering PHP 7.3+ for your project, it would be good to note the following benefits.

The Benefits Of Using PHP:

  • Open Source.
  • Highly Extendible.
  • Easy to learn and read.
  • Platform independent.
  • Compatible with APACHE.
  • Low development and maintenance cost.
  • Great community and support.
  • Detailed documentation that has everything you need!

Why PHP 7.3+?

  • Flexible Heredoc & Nowdoc Syntaxes - Two key methods for defining strings within PHP. They also became easier to read and more reliable.
  • A good boost in performance speed which is extremely important when it comes to WordPress development.
See more
Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
DebianDebianUbuntuUbuntuFedoraFedora
at

We use Debian and its derivative Ubuntu because the apt ecosystem and toolchain for Debian packages is far superior to the yum-based system used by Fedora and RHEL. This is large part due to a huge amount of investment into tools like debhelper/dh over the years by the Debian community. I haven't dealt with RPM in the last couple years, but every experience I've had with RPM is that the RPM tools are slower, have less useful options, and it's more work to package software for them (and one makes more compromises in doing so).

I think everyone has seen the better experience using Ubuntu in the shift of prevalence from RHEL to Ubuntu in what most new companies are deploying on their servers, and I expect that trend to continue as long as Red Hat is using the RPM system (and I don't really see them as having a path to migrate).

The experience with Ubuntu and Debian stable releases is pretty similar: A solid release every 2 years that's supported for a few years. (While Ubuntu in theory releases every 6 months, their non-LTS releases are effectively betas: They're often unstable, only have 9 months of support, etc. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone not actively participating in Ubuntu the development community). Ubuntu has better integration of non-free drivers, which may be important if you have hardware that requires them. But it's also the case that most bugs I experience when using Ubuntu are Ubuntu-specific issues, especially on servers (in part because Ubuntu has a bunch of "cloud management" stuff pre-installed that is definitely a regression if you're not using Canonical's cloud management products).

See more
Kali Linux logo

Kali Linux

247
371
25
Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution
247
371
+ 1
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PROS OF KALI LINUX
  • 8
    Penetration testing tools are pre-installed
  • 8
    Has many penetration testing tools
  • 5
    Runs on both x86 and ARM platforms
  • 3
    Its just debian so it has better support
  • 1
    There's no restrictions
CONS OF KALI LINUX
  • 3
    Wireless driver issues on some systems
  • 3
    Packages are too large in size as compare to alpine
  • 3
    Outdated versions of common packages
  • 2
    Root GUI setup is a potential security hole

related Kali Linux posts

Shared insights
on
Kali LinuxKali LinuxArch LinuxArch LinuxLinuxLinux

I do find Linux-based systems to be cool! However, I am confused when it comes to which Linux operating system to use. I cannot make my mind between Arch Linux and Kali Linux. Guys, give me some advice if you would be so kind.

See more
Linux logo

Linux

2.9K
2.3K
41
A family of free and open source software operating systems based on the Linux kernel
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PROS OF LINUX
  • 17
    Open Source
  • 11
    Free
  • 8
    Reliability
  • 5
    Safe
CONS OF LINUX
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Linux posts

    Rogério R. Alcântara
    Shared insights
    on
    macOSmacOSLinuxLinuxGitGitDockerDocker

    Personal Dotfiles management

    Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.

    Ideally, I reckon, it should:

    • be containerized (Docker?)
    • be versionable (Git)
    • ensure idempotency
    • allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
    • be fully recoverable (Linux/ macOS)
    • be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)

    Does it make sense?

    See more
    John Calandra
    Data Manager at The Garrett Group · | 8 upvotes · 354.5K views

    There is a question coming... I am using Oracle VirtualBox to spawn 3 Ubuntu Linux virtual machines (VM). VM1 is being used as a data lake - just a place to store flat files. VM2 hosts Apache NiFi. VM3 hosts PostgreSQL. I have built a NiFi pipeline that reads flat files on VM1 and then pipes the data over to and inserts it into the Postgresql database. I left this setup alone for a while, and then something hiccupped on VM3, and I had to rebuild it. Now I cannot make a remote connection to Postgresql on VM3. I was using pgAdmin3 on VM3, but it kept throwing errors - I found out it went end-of-life in 2018 and uninstalled it. pgAdmin4 is out, but for some reason, I cannot get the APT utility to find/install it. I am trying to figure out the pgAdmin4 install problem and looking for a good alternative for pgAdmin4 that I can use to diagnose the remote database connection problem. Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

    See more
    Alpine Linux logo

    Alpine Linux

    2.1K
    393
    37
    Security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox
    2.1K
    393
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    PROS OF ALPINE LINUX
    • 10
      Secure
    • 9
      Good in containers
    • 8
      Fast
    • 1
      Supports armhf, aarch64, x86, ppc64, armv7,s390x
    • 1
      Does not run glibc binaries
    • 1
      Minimal dependencies
    • 1
      Widely used in docker containers everywhere
    • 1
      Musl based
    • 1
      Choice of init system
    • 1
      Excellent Package Manager
    • 1
      Small footprint
    • 1
      Small install footprint
    • 1
      Small memory footprint
    CONS OF ALPINE LINUX
    • 2
      Cannot install metasploit
    • 1
      Does not run glibc binaries
    • 1
      Not for inexperienced users

    related Alpine Linux posts