Enterprise Linux on desktop?

I looked at RHEL pricing but damn hell no.

The rest is even more outdated than Debian, so just use Debian.

In general stable Desktops are not enjoyable. You will basically not want to read Linux News anymore as you wont be getting any of that.

Its good for enterprises, where policies dont need to change etc. Also in combination with Flatpak and EPEL it may work somehow, but its just worse than using some normal Distro I heard.

@Pantherina
There is a free subscription for RHEL for individuals.

And I think it's less of an issue nowadays with old packages since we have extra layers such as podman containers over distrobox, flatpak, snap, Nix etc.
Then you can have a solid base OS with less solid layers on top where things are allowed to break but don't mess with the rest of the system. I use Fedora Kinoite as my base for this exact reason.
- Interesting, didnt know that.
  
  Snaps are only somewhat secure on Ubuntu, at least to my state of knowledge. Only on Ubuntu do they have the Apparmor profiles to isolate apps.
  
  I think Fedora Atomic is just better for most cases. KDE got their stuff together mostly (I will not want to use a stable version until 6.3 or something) and the rest of Fedora never breaks for me.
CentOS is just RHEL without the support.
- You're more out of date than RHEL. Centos was killed off in 2020, stream is upstream.
  
  RHEL with the free licence is RHEL without support.
- This isn't true since Dec 2021.

I run RHEL on my personal desktop and laptop. Why? Because I use it at work and the more I use it the better I understand it. This benefits me both at home and at work. I've even built Ansible roles and playbooks in git to setup my home machines. Overkill? Sure, but I have great peace if mind if I lose a boot drive that I'll be right back to normal quickly.

You can absolutely use an enterprise distro at home. Ignore the trolls about "It's all too old" or "it doesn't have X software". I don't care what version vim, GNOME or pretty much anything is, as long as I can open the core tools I need. For "missing" software: I've yet to find any software I "need" that I haven't figured out how to install (again: Ansible-d) including Flatpak for all the normie stuff (spotify, slack, discord, etc) and I'm golden.

My $0.02

You can absolutely use an enterprise distro at home. Ignore the trolls about "It's all too old" or "it doesn't have X software". I don't care what version vim, GNOME or pretty much anything is, as long as I can open the core tools I need.

It's not trolling. There's a very legitimate reason to use a distro with new packages and that is hardware compatibility - especially if you're on a recent laptop, and you want all features working such as WiFi, flawless suspend and resume without battery drain or crashes, working Fn keys, or you want to make use of all the power management features in your processor (eg see all the recent AMD p-state driver advancements).

Newer packages (specifically: the kernel and mesa/vulkan stack) are also important for those who are gamers, as several performance improvements, bug fixes and compatibility fixes are made with each new release. For instance, just take a look at these performance benefits of the new ntsync driver:

Finally, even productivity users who don't care about gaming can benefit from recent system packages - consider all the recent improvements in filesystem drivers such as btrfs and ntfs3, and the addition of the new bcachefs driver with kernel 6.7 which is a godsend for anyone running a tiered storage setup.

Also, the entire Linux community has been buzzing with the release of KDE 6 - just take a look at all the new features and improvements - such as much better Wayland support with tons of bug fixes, HDR, ICC profiles for individual monitors, color blindless correction filters for making the desktop experience better for people with protanopia/deuteranopia/tritanopia... there are some very legitimate improvements and use-cases here. How can you just wave all this off as trolling?!

So just because a distro with old packages suits your needs, doesn't mean that everyone else is trolling. There are legit good reasons why many home users prefer leading-edge distros like Fedora, Arch, Tumbleweed etc.

cc: @anders@rytter.me
- Hi! I sincerely want to thank you for your well thought out response. I apologize if the word troll came off wrong. I probably should have used a better descriptor. My primary goal was to be a voice FOR enterprise distros at home - because I saw mostly posts from people who probably aren't professional sysadmins and have never even tried an enterprise distro.
  
  I fully concede on the VERY new hardware being a challenge for RHEL, an Ubuntu LTS or similar. I'm unfortunately not in a situation where I can afford that problem (kids and daycare costs) so it's fallen off my radar. I do occasionally run into it at work with research groups that just buy the latest/fastest gaming hardware without checking with IT (we would generally steer them towards workstation/data center grade hardware instead of gaming hardware...not applicable to this discussion for home use). If somehow I could acquire something with new enough hardware to have that problem I'd probably use Fedora on it (so I could just modify my Ansible to work with both), and wait for current Fedora to become RHEL and then that hardware would become RHEL for the rest of it's lifetime. Mainly - the huge number of constant updates and the every 6 month big updates on Fedora are just too much hassle for me.
  
  On gaming and the other comparisons about improvements on newer packages: I do agree with you. My personal approach has just moved to use what is "tried and tested" and "good enough". It's a pretty common approach for sysadmins to let other early adopters find all of the bugs in new stuff. For example: I'm excited about bcachefs, but when I installed Fedora Rawhide just to test it after the recent 6.7 release - I found it largely NOT ready for anything I would need to trust (commands that return the console, but no indication that they did nothing for example - doesn't give me a good feeling about putting all of my family photos on it until it matures). For now, I'll still use XFS for small systems and ZFS for large systems or where I need send/receive.
  
  All of that said: I acknowledge these are preferences and my approach, not a " right" way. I do still think it's a valid approach for some who wants less updates and a more stable config if they're happy with "fast enough" and less potential for update breakage.
  
  Thank you again for being respectful and detailed in your response. Cheers!
Hmm ... I'm definitely not going to use RHEL for anything I'm not explicitly ordered to by my employer, but the thought of using Ansible or similar to set up my home system is interesting... I may have to give that a try, and I've got a new system I'm building
- You can also use Ansible with just about anything, as long as you can connect to it over SSH or with a REST API. You don't have to use RHEL, specifically. I use it for """declarative""" package management on my Arch system.
@GnomeComedy ansible sounds cool. i don't know anything about it, but it seems like this is a bit of the same as i'm doing with Dockerfiles for my Fedora Kinoite. building my own custom OS image with github actions and then every 3rd day the new image gets pulled by my pc from the cloud.

RHEL at work.

Not having Kate or Okular is a pain.
Need to download cmake for certain cases.
Subscription Manager is a pain.

Air gap means I can't make do with snaps.

I would also gripe about not having KDE, but that would be unfair and off topic in this case.

@ulterno
For which cases did you need cake for example?

My base OS is Fedora Kinoite and I'm considering have AlmaLinux in a podman container for some applications and tools. Replacing it every year because fedora is eol is too often in my opinion.

Hasn't Kate been replaced by an upgraded Kwrite or is Kate still maintained?
- For which cases did you need cake for example?
  
  Since you asked, I don't usually need cake, since I don't do parties, but I might occasionally buy a piece and eat it.
  
  Hasn’t Kate been replaced by an upgraded Kwrite or is Kate still maintained?
  
  kate and kwrite are both maintained and usable side by side on the same system.
  In terms of features... kwrite : kate :: notepad : notepad++. Kinda... kwrite is still much more featurefull than notepad.
  They have KDE Frameworks dependencies, which makes it non-trivial to install on RHEL when you can only access the local base and EPEL repo.
Yeah, basically your DE will be the default of the distro. I've never had good luck with KDE above Centos 7. But I'm good with Gnome. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's not worth my time and effort personally.

Rocky 9 as my daily driver on both desktop and laptop, yeah. Ever since starting my current job a couple years ago, where we use RHEL everywhere from servers to desktops I just started switching my entire homelab to Rocky.

Personally it's perfectly fine. Not as flashy or glamorous as Pop OS (which is definitely a fun choice) but I like the stability. I need my computer to be secure and also just work so I can use it to do what I need or want to do.

Still have Steam, Discord, FF, Thunderbird, YTMDA, etc all running just fine on it, though I normally stream from my Windows PC when I'm using it for gaming.

As a sysadmin and developer, I prefer Linux as my daily to Windows (hey, this was a surprise to me, anyway), and from that list I prefer Rocky over others currently. Maybe one day that'll change, but I don't see me moving any time soon.

Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn't bother me.

Sort of

Not even close

Fedora Rawhide (?) == Opensuse TW

Fedora == Opensuse leap

RHEL == Suse enterprise

The higher ones are a testing ground for the one below, until you get to the actual product, the enterprise distros. They have completely different priorities

Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

Unless you're running bleeding edge hardware, you can install the drivers just fine. Enterprise users also need GPUs. Flatpak solves steam in most cases.
- Opensuse Leap is built from SUSE Linux Enterprise and then additional packages added (those packages from Opensuse are also available to SUSE), it is not very comparable to Fedora and is more like Rocky Linux. SLE doesn’t have an upstream distribution in the same way Fedora is to RHEL.
- TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.
  
  As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.
- @Shareni Not sure this comparison is correct
  
  Fedora rather corresponds to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing
  
  Fedora Rawhide is very experimental, OpenSUSE once had a testing version, couldn’t find it now on the download page

Have. I like btrfs, you only get that with Oracle and they have philosophical issues, but also random brokenness with things like selinux policies.

Old packages aren’t really an issue for me, but missing packages that haven’t been put into EPEL can be a pain. Depends what you want to accomplish or need.

I feel similarly about Fedora’s quick EOL, which was how I got onto an enterprise desktop distro too. The paper cuts are why I ended up switching to Mint.

You can use btrfs with any distro. It's just easier to install on some than others. Ubuntu and Mint will automatically create subvolumes for root and home if you install on a btrfs partition. With Debian, you have to manually create and mount all of the subvolumes before starting the installation.
- You can't really use it with redhat. You can swap the kernel and install the user space tools, but then you won't get support from redhat.
- Except CentOS/RHEL. RH doesn’t build the kernels with btrfs support.

Nowadays with Flatpaks you can use any distros you want.

@mfat and with Distrobox containers.
- This is what I am using on Debian Stable

Rhel is fine. No reason not to try it, they’re letting you register sixteen systems for free.

It doesn't make any sense.

Why staying on old package for unnecessary stability (that stability is for highly "mission critical" things).

I used Rocky 9 at home for a while. I think I had an emergency with a disk and had to install fedora because it's all I had. I also use Rocky 8 workstations at work without any problem.

I could easily slip back to Rocky over Fedora no problem. But I don't game or do anything except serve ipa.

Edit: and yes these were/are my daily driver desktops.

@zenharbinger
Okay cool. I don't game so for me that's not a problem neither if games don't work.

I've done the other way around

@possiblylinux127
What do you mean with other way around?
- Pop OS, Debian and Linux Mint in production

I'm curious if it's easy to use for this purpose or if the older packages are a pain.

I'm currently running MX + nix unstable. Debian's not enterprise, but it's close enough.

There are some things that are pretty hard to handle. For example large DEs like KDE, or Nvidia proprietary drivers. I wouldn't even try to handle them through nix.

Besides that, you'll also have to deal with the issues the other PM might have. For example flatpak and outdated system libraries (flatpak doesn't provide them). Nix doesn't have that issue because it provides everything, but it uses more disk space, and you have to deal with nix docs.

In the end it really depends on your needs, and only trying it out will tell you for sure. If you're a gamer with the newest hardware, you're probably not going to have fun. If you need it for work, it'll be great if you can deal with an external PM. If you need it as a media device, slap on a few flatpaks and it's perfect.

For me, this approach is far better than using a rolling distro, and I might try out RHEL at some point just out of curiosity. Unlike Arch, Debian will always boot, but I still have the newest docker instead of the one that was deprecated 3 months ago and won't be updated for at least a year. Also, home-maanger makes it a breeze to make a list of packages and have them installed wherever and whenever.

Also, Centos is gone, stream is upstream so it's a testing ground for RHEL instead of a RHEL repack. I wouldn't go with the bootleg RHELs, that's just asking for trouble if they haven't switched to upstream as well.

@Shareni
With bootleg RHELs you mean Alma and Rocky?
- Yeah. They used to be RHEL derivatives, but now they're either upstream (Alma) or a mix of legally dubious sources and upstream (Rocky).
  
  They can't be as stable, and 16 free RHEL licences is more than enough for personal or small business use.

Even on servers, "stable" distros suck.

It's less bad these days thanks to Docker but when Docker was even a few years old, guess which servers still had no support for it....

Fedora is probably the closest you can practically get.

It can be done, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Containers and VMs running a stable distro on top of something like Fedora, Tumbleweed, or whatever else is my preferred setup.

Something like Fedora also has a more mature in-place upgrade ability than the EL distros have.

Strange...

Usually you'd run the more stable distro on the bottom and the more cutting-edge on top, not the other way around.
- The cutting edge distro will have better consumer hardware support, which matters in a laptop/desktop.
Containers and VMs running a stable distro on top of something like Fedora, Tumbleweed, or whatever else is my preferred setup.

Just why?

Something like Fedora also has a more mature in-place upgrade ability than the EL distros have.

RHEL gets a new version every 5 years, not every 6 months. It's not really relevant since OP has 3 more years before maintenance support starts. By that time a full format is definitely in order.
- Just why? RHEL gets a new version every 5 years.
  
  You answered your own question. Maintaining software will eat up lots of time. It’s fine when there is a team to maintain software for installs, but not really something a single person running a desktop/laptop probably wants to deal with.
  
  The 5yr release cycle is a pain starting about year 3 even for people who get paid to deal with it. 😆
  
  VMs and containers on top of something more up to date is the best of both. Up to date distro with features, and all the distros one could want!
  
  In-place upgrades are very relevant. Who wants to destroy their setup and reinstall everything when a new OS is released?
  
  There is leapp for EL in-place upgrades, but it’s new and rather rough, from my testing.
  
  Flatpak has made software support better, but I’d still recommend something else without a concrete reason, like proprietary CFD software or something which only supports EL.