> I'm probably biased though because the high-energy-physics stuff I develop for usually runs on EL-variants
This is due to university lock in. RedHat convinced a lot of institutions that they were better off paying for Linux. I think a lot of the establishment couldn't use free software because they had no procedure in place for doing so. Often buying a RedHat support agreement was the most palatable or even only way to get on the Linux bandwagon.
Around the time RedHat stopped supporting desktop RedHat and spawned Fedora they turned their focus towards selling contracts and creating so called enterprise features such as remote management which appealed to institutional IT teams, to the detriment of the desktop user.
RedHat has made a lot of money this way but they lost their position as the dominant Linux distro because the hackers whom RedHat originally catered to moved on to distros which paid then more attention.
Let me put this to you in another light... Would you rather simply update the definitions on your satellite server and then check the status of your upgrades the next day, or would you like to upgrade 1500 assorted servers and VMs manually?
This is due to university lock in. RedHat convinced a lot of institutions that they were better off paying for Linux. I think a lot of the establishment couldn't use free software because they had no procedure in place for doing so. Often buying a RedHat support agreement was the most palatable or even only way to get on the Linux bandwagon.
Around the time RedHat stopped supporting desktop RedHat and spawned Fedora they turned their focus towards selling contracts and creating so called enterprise features such as remote management which appealed to institutional IT teams, to the detriment of the desktop user.
RedHat has made a lot of money this way but they lost their position as the dominant Linux distro because the hackers whom RedHat originally catered to moved on to distros which paid then more attention.