# Red Hat Enterprise Linux

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Enterprise Linux distribution recommended for servers and for businesses willing to pay for support. Common caveat: major version upgrades often break scripts.

## Why people recommend it

- Same family as Fedora (4 comments): "Debian/Devuan, Fedora/RHEL/Alma/Rocky, Arch/Artix, FreeBSD/OpenBS/NetBSD are all anyone will ever need." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502678)) "A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085326)) "I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46789846))
- Accountable maintainers and paid support (2 comments): "I just want to put a layer of maintainers who have higher stake than others between me and the world." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041097)) "for any serious shop willing to spend money on support I'd probably go with RHEL" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47651896))
- Suits servers and NAS builds (2 comments): "just install Fedora or RHEL and you have a NAS already" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47452539)) "RHEL is even better for that" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445776))

## What people warn about

- Major upgrades break scripts (2 comments): "I have yet to experience a RHEL major version change that did not blow up all my tiny simplistic python scripts." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48869990)) "upgrading RHEL from 9 to 10" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47598113))
- Heavy backported patches on old base (2 comments): "it's essentially a RHEL7 with frankenstein-style patches all the way up" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47308819)) "RedHat for that RHEL version patched back some old considered insecure primitives to keep their customers happy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48818163))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ubuntu](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ubuntu.md): 560 recommend
- [Debian](https://hackerapproved.com/p/debian.md): 552 recommend
- [Fedora Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fedora.md): 437 recommend
- [Arch Linux](https://hackerapproved.com/p/arch-linux.md): 362 recommend
- [Linux Mint](https://hackerapproved.com/p/linux-mint.md): 277 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://www.redhat.com/en)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", https://hackerapproved.com/p/rhel/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).