Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Shares rank 37 of 63 Linux distributions by recommenders
Enterprise Linux distribution recommended for servers and for businesses willing to pay for support. Common caveat: major version upgrades often break scripts.
Enterprise Linux distribution recommended for servers and for businesses willing to pay for support. Common caveat: major version upgrades often break scripts.
17 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 6
- approval share
- 65%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Same family as Fedora
“Debian/Devuan, Fedora/RHEL/Alma/Rocky, Arch/Artix, FreeBSD/OpenBS/NetBSD are all anyone will ever need.”
Comment from 30 Aug 2026 in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root” “A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now”
Comment from 20 Feb 2026 in “An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review” “I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL”
Comment from 28 Jan 2026 in “Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company” - Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers”
Accountable maintainers and paid support
“I just want to put a layer of maintainers who have higher stake than others between me and the world.”
Comment from 24 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: What Linux distro do you daily drive?” “for any serious shop willing to spend money on support I'd probably go with RHEL”
Comment from 5 Apr 2026 in “Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11” Suits servers and NAS builds
“just install Fedora or RHEL and you have a NAS already”
Comment from 20 Mar 2026 in “Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers” “RHEL is even better for that”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Major upgrades break scripts
“I have yet to experience a RHEL major version change that did not blow up all my tiny simplistic python scripts.”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “Scarf has moved away from Haskell” “upgrading RHEL from 9 to 10”
Comment from 1 Apr 2026 in “Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails” Heavy backported patches on old base
“it's essentially a RHEL7 with frankenstein-style patches all the way up”
Comment from 9 Mar 2026 in “Kubernetes 1.35 silently breaks AL2 EKS nodes that lost patches in November” “RedHat for that RHEL version patched back some old considered insecure primitives to keep their customers happy”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “OpenSSH 10.4/10.4p1 Released”
Other Linux distributions people recommend
The four most recommended other Linux distributions, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu | 560 | 493 | 53% | 12 | 10 yrs116 owners | — |
| Debian | 552 | 191 | 74% | 13 | 10 yrs62 owners | Approved |
| NixOS | 454 | 112 | 80% | 13 | 2 yrs69 owners | Approved |
| Fedora Linux | 437 | 131 | 77% | 12 | 2 yrs72 owners | Approved |
| Red Hat Enterprise LinuxThis page | 11 | 6 | 65% | 9 | — | — |
What people said
16 of the 18 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Except RHEL. They don't include it in their kernels.”
“Debian/Devuan, Fedora/RHEL/Alma/Rocky, Arch/Artix, FreeBSD/OpenBS/NetBSD are all anyone will ever need.”
“I just want to put a layer of maintainers who have higher stake than others between me and the world.”
“I have yet to experience a RHEL major version change that did not blow up all my tiny simplistic python scripts.”
“RedHat for that RHEL version patched back some old considered insecure primitives to keep their customers happy”
“RHEL was always more work on the server than other distros IMO.”
“kswapd acting up in RHEL compatible distros and eating CPU to a degree to freeze the whole system”
“for any serious shop willing to spend money on support I'd probably go with RHEL”
“upgrading RHEL from 9 to 10”
“those aren’t exactly the best desktop OSes”
“just install Fedora or RHEL and you have a NAS already”
“RHEL is even better for that”
“it's essentially a RHEL7 with frankenstein-style patches all the way up”
“A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now”
“I am not seeing these kind of systemd issues with Fedora / RHEL”
“I switched to RHEL on my work PC.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.