RHEL/SUSE?

[AlphaObeisance]

This one's for the Systems Administrators out there. I'm genuinely curious as to what is the most commonly used Enterprise Distro out there. I've heard most times that RHEL is industry standard but that OpenSUSE is right up there in popularity?

If you say CentOS I wont take anything you say seriously. If you're still using CentOS please point me in the direction of your Supervisor so that I can put in an application. (Not being rude, but CentOS was discontinued in '21 and CentOS Stream due to be discontinued this year(?).

I'm genuinely just curious that if I get a gig in systems administration what the most likely distro to be encountered in the enterprise environment would likely be.

 

[dos2unix]

In a way, this is a trick question.

Redhat own about 70% of the datacenter ( Linux ) market share.

Compare the best Linux distros for enterprise servers | TechTarget

When it comes to the best Linux distros, a little research goes a long way. Explore your support options with distros from Red Hat to Oracle.

www.techtarget.com

Red Hat: Leading the enterprise Linux server market

New IDC research shows that Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintains its lead as the world's leading enterprise Linux platform.

www.redhat.com

However, SuSE rules Europe. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-big-three-linux-companies-ranked

But the numbers are really fudged, and no one knows sure when it comes to redhat. here's the problem...
Redhat, RockyLinux, OracleLinux, CentOS and AlmaLinux all show up as "redhat". In some cases even Fedora and AWS
Linux show up as redhat. ( AWS is based on Amazon Linux, which is really a rebranded fedora ).
But even if you ignore the fedora clones. You still have 5 or 6 redhat clones. How many of those are "real" redhat?

But if we include the redhat clones, then you can say redhat owns more commercial ( datacenter ) linux market
share than all other Linux's put together.

 

[AlphaObeisance]

That's some solid info! Thank you! I should have clarified I was more focused on US based companies as that's most likely where I'd land a gig. Though I've heard of techs getting jobs over seas all the time; but I don't know the first thing about doing something like that.

I'm one of those goons that doesn't much see the difference in forked distro's; but that's mostly out of innocent ignorance. RHEL imho is just fedora since it's downstream but it's really just a semantics argument. sudo dnf = sudo dnf namsayun?

I've never understood the necessity of "forks" but then again I don't know much about the kernel level of Linux so the differences seem so subtle to me that I don't see the point. Mostly choice of DE and preconfigured configurations but i tend to prefer bare bones and build up from there if that makes sense; which makes forks pretty irrelevant. (Not trying to sound arrogant, I'm open to being educated because knowledge is all i truly seek here).

I'm intrigued by the difference between RHEL/SUSE US/EU and why that may be exactly? I love learning this stuff, so trust your time is appreciated. Thanks for the comment!

 

[dos2unix]

According to this site.

https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/operating-systems--443/suse-linux-market-share

It's less than 1% in the US for commercial installs.

Which seems to agree with the site. Which says less than 13,000 companies use SuSE in the US.
( opposed to over 2 million redhat sites )

SUSE commands 0.36% market share in Operating Systems

enlyft industry research shows that SUSE has a market share of about 0.36% compared to leading competitors Canonical Ubuntu, Linux and Debian.

enlyft.com

This site says it could be as high as 2% in the US.

Linux Operating System Market Size, Share | Forecast [2032]

The global Linux operating system market size was valued at $18.35 billion in 2023 & is projected to grow from $21.97 billion in 2024 to $99.69 billion by 2032

www.fortunebusinessinsights.com

 

[dos2unix]

You have to be careful of how you reqad the data. For example...

Linux Statistics 2025 - TrueList

Read on to discover the most relevant Linux statistics and learn about its user demographics, market share and adoption, usage data, and more!

truelist.co

Says Ubuntu is the most popular distro. However that's for desktop hobbyists, not enterprise datacenter
installs. There are some Mint, Fedora, and SuSE users who would challenge the numbers above even for the desktop.

 

[AlphaObeisance]

On the home lab I've been running Ubuntu LTS for all the dedicated servers I run. Been contemplating setting up some pools for RHEL/SUSE just to become more acquainted with the systems syntax and repositories so to be familiar if I encounter them in the future.

I'm still reading your initial articles (solid info!). I've got OpenSUSE Tumbleweed in staging. I'm intrigued by it due to the fact it's it's own distro and not some downstream fork of another project. No doubt going to play with both.

Proxmox has made it really nice to play around and familiarize myself with the different options out there. Though I need to learn more about Promox itself as I can't seem to figure out GPU pass through. The node supports it, I've got a dinky lil GPU in there for testing but i digress, I'll make a new post on that fun bit at a later date if I start to feel too defeated.

The primary reason I made the inquiry in the OP was due to contemplating deploying RHEL/SUSE onto my host PC replacing my Arch installation for a sort of "full immersion" tactic for familiarizing myself with the OS so not to be caught off guard if someone asks me about RHEL/SUSE. But either way I'll run em both on the hypervisor so experience will be gained either way.

In your secondary and tertiary posts you touch on the points I hate most about bloggers, there's so much bias and miss information both innocent and deliberate for the sake of clicks that I tend to avoid blog posts and articles entirely. Generally opting for forum discussion instead as real time conversation generally helps identify any bias on the matter; enabling me to formulate my own opinions based on the discussion.

Really appreciate you chatting with me on this! Learning a good bit already!

 

[AlphaObeisance]

"What does make a difference is support for these features. Verify that the main features your enterprise uses are supported by -- not just technically feasible on -- the distribution. For example: Your server infrastructure relies on Linux container virtualization (LXC). SLES offers LXC, which can run many instances of the operating system on the same kernel. LXC isn't supported on RHEL, so even if technically you can run it, Red Hat would not offer support for the containers." source

I actually didn't know that RHEL did not offer container support? That's inconvenient. I'm assuming you'd have to use something like Podman to manage docker containers on RHEL, and manually enable repositories for container management manually? Sorry for the ignorance.This is intriguing to me. I'd of thought container support would be default on any enterprise server considering how easy it is to expedite server and service setup?

Fun stuff!

 

[f33dm3bits]

I actually didn't know that RHEL did not offer container support? That's inconvenient. I'm assuming you'd have to use something like Podman to manage docker containers on RHEL, and manually enable repositories for container management manually?

You can use Podman on RHEL but Redhat also has a container platform which can run on RHEL called Openshift.