Red Hat recently
announced that its
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the Linux operating system leader. While that alone is magnificent, there's more in the original article than it seems.
The fastest growing operating system vendor
The stats below released by IDC in May 2018 show 14.5% increase in 5 year, making RH the fastest growing operating system vendor.
 |
| Source: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-linux-operating-system-leader |
Strong Growth in the installation base
A growth in the installation base was also highlighted, making RH now side by side with Apple in OS installation base. That's fantastic!
 |
| Source: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-linux-operating-system-leader |
Still according to IDC, Red Hat “remains a leading innovator of new Linux operating system technologies, as well as complementary technologies such as middleware, virtualization, and PaaS.”
RHEL for the rest of us
So what about the rest of us developers and small shops that can't afford a RHEL licence? In case you wonder, yes it's possible to run RHEL on the desktop but I'd like to point out two community-driven equivalents available for free:
Fedora Linux and
CentOS.
CentOS
CentOS is a community-drivem free/libre/open-source
RHEL equivalent operating system for servers. CentOS is a fantastic distribution, very stable and supported by a big, dedicated community. CentOS is also used in millions of servers worldwide. Want to know more? Check
my reasons to run CentOS.
Fedora
Fedora is one of the most cutting-edge distros out there and incubator for
Red Hat Linux. If you want to be part of that innovation and run what will eventually be released on RHEL, then I'd urge you to try out
Fedora. Fedora is also available on a multitude of options: KDE, XFCE, IoT, containers and more, much more. In case you're interested, learn
why I use Fedora.
Conclusion
RHEL is a strong and leading Linux operating system for servers on enterprise software. That fact that it keeps growing worldwide means that, learning and using it is a fantastic opportunity from developers and sysadmins. In that end, both
CentOS and
Fedora are excellent alternatives and are available for free.
Read Next
See Also
