63 engineers on Hacker News describe using Red Hat Enterprise Linux first-hand: 10 endorse it, 12 regret it, 4 are mixed.
“When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on: Red Hat Enterprise Linux”
regret · personal · newsoftheday · 2026-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RHEL itself wasn't ready for the package, apparently”
mixed · production · hackrmn · 2026-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So many that we migrated away from it, when they backported a driver bug into centos 5 and then did the same backport of a bug for centos 6.”
regret · production · PunchyHamster · 2026-05-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I also have experience with RedHat, but for RedHat the long term support always ends up being "I hope I don't work here anymore”
regret · production · tete · 2025-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But our datacenter servers remain RHEL for the simple reason ... the deployment and broad customisation process per server is easy”
endorse · production · nineteen999 · 2024-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“With RHEL, it all makes sense again. I know what's going on and I am in control.”
endorse · production · Goofy_Coyote · 2024-07-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“without exaggeration we thousands lines of code of fixes for stuff in RHEL5/6... that just went away when we moved to Debian”
regret · production · ilyt · 2023-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RH support has been in my experience very, very good”
endorse · production · kjs3 · 2023-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“With RHEL 6 we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL.”
endorse · production · aeyes · 2023-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've also experienced some "fun" with how they manage it and versions in general... So yeah, we're very happy we migrated off it.”
regret · production · ilyt · 2023-04-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“This is one of the reasons we migrated away. The idea that EL charges money with no in-place upgrade path is madness.”
regret · production · klipklop · 2023-03-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the license servers, etc always have broken while CentOS just have worked.”
regret · production · jeltz · 2022-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“while I have been using RedHat since the dot-com days, I am now a Ubuntu user.”
regret · personal · 20 yr · strenholme · 2020-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Redhat 4 still in production, along with RH 5.”
regret · production · badjobthrowaway · 2018-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run it on Redhat so this might actually bode well for us. Until it comes time to renew our Redhat licenses”
mixed · production · nineteen999 · 2018-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I see more and more customers wanting Red Hat/CentOS than any other Linux distro and for good reason. It just works.”
endorse · production · secret_island · 2017-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the version that's built into RHEL6 is too old and can't build cryptography, etc. We have to add EPEL because RHEL6 and RHEL7 don't provide Redis”
regret · production · jamiesonbecker · 2017-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they have a habit of removing packages that compete with their commercial offerings, which forces you to either compile from source or to install from other repositories”
regret · production · abrookewood · 2017-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it runs RHEL in VMWare without much difficulty.”
endorse · production · Jtsummers · 2016-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our prod servers are almost always RHEL ... because guess what -- support is kinda important to most companies”
endorse · production · eitally · 2014-04-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RHEL has way, way better (and accurate) documentation than any other distro I've used, particularly when it comes to unattended installations”
endorse · production · otterley · 2012-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The biggest problem is having to use old LTS distros in production that only have python 2.6”
regret · production · darkarmani · 2012-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love everything redhat does for the community, but I can't help but get a sense that they are cannibalizing their current users”
mixed · production · davvid · 2012-11-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run far bigger PostgreSQL DBs than this, and we've never had a RHEL crash. Ever.”
endorse · production · foobarbazetc · 2012-02-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the day job, we use RedHat Enterprise... I'm not a particularly big fan of RH-based distros”
mixed · production · bmelton · 2011-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I setup a client with a small instance running RedHat and never experienced any latency.”
endorse · production · nckbz · 2011-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Everywhere I've ever worked used a mainstream distro for cloud servers, like Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat or SUSE.”
neutral · production · 80fj0348i · 2026-10-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run most things on Alma Linux, but there's also RedHat in the mix.”
neutral · production · amadio · 2026-09-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“starting with RHEL3, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, and finally ArchLinux”
neutral · personal · throwup238 · 2024-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“when we moved to RHEL 8, but I'm sure most in the corporate world aren't so fortunate.”
neutral · production · wycy · 2024-06-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the fleet consists of freebsd rhel7 xnu win10 openbsd netbsd pi silicon”
neutral · production · jart · 2023-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's close enough that RHEL tends to work fine.”
neutral · production · hackmiester · 2023-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At work we run RHEL where we needed support and Alma where we don't.”
neutral · production · doubled112 · 2023-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've used AIX, HP-UX, OEL (Oracle Enterprise Linux) and RHEL. We use it because there's a support contract”
neutral · production · csours · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently rewrote the system we use to push user accounts and passwords... on RHEL 8”
neutral · production · hrrsn · 2022-12-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We work in a "hyperscale" environment ... predominantly on RHEL and a little Debian.”
neutral · production · placatedmayhem · 2022-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Many sandboxing features require a relatively modern systemd and will do nothing on older distros (we run RHEL9).”
neutral · production · e1g · 2022-09-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Linux VMs in Azure were either RHEL or CentOS.”
neutral · production · frameset · 2022-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my job we run several third party applications that are targeted at RHEL/RHEL-clones.”
neutral · production · ploek · 2022-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use rhel at work & have always paid for the licenses.”
neutral · production · second--shift · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RHEL? Yes. Lots of CentOS, most now looking at Rocky and Alma.”
neutral · production · doubled112 · 2021-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“LVM always brings me some trepidation as the result of various imploding RHEL5 machines”
neutral · production · Thev00d00 · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have an internal RHEL vs AMZ Linux 2 battle, because of the RHEL support”
neutral · production · bassman9000 · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I know RHEL really well because of work, so for personal use CentOS is awesome”
neutral · production · freedomben · 2020-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run CentOS for non-critical stuff and RHEL for stuff that really needs support.”
neutral · production · Yeroc · 2020-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When we shifted to RHEL 8, we attempted to move this over to Podman”
neutral · production · ranadeep · 2020-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“HP machines hosting RHEL VM's running TIBCO, JAVA and Cassandra”
neutral · production · leokennis · 2020-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“deploy to a (almost EOL) RHEL6 box”
neutral · production · mzaccari · 2020-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In 2018 I got certified in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”
neutral · personal · znpy · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like.”
neutral · production · reacharavindh · 2018-11-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For example in RHEL 7.5 we switched from devicemapper to overlayfs, but existing instances don't get automatically transitioned.”
neutral · production · cgwalters · 2018-05-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“buy into something that we could get vendor support for on RHEL6 (so not docker)”
neutral · production · hvindin · 2017-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So far I've been using it to back up a few dozen RHEL 4 - RHEL 7 systems over the last couple years without issues.”
neutral · production · 2 yr · derekp7 · 2017-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We are starting to build simple docker containers for python via RHEL SCL version”
neutral · production · epalmer · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“If we ship code that runs on SuSE 234 and RHEL 345, that's what we test on.”
neutral · production · concede_pluto · 2017-07-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we use Redhat servers which come with Python pre-installed”
neutral · production · __john · 2015-07-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Most of my work is on Linux machines of one flavor or another (mostly RHEL and a few Ubuntu)”
neutral · production · cestes · 2014-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they were not even providing the proper update packages from RHEL due to system misconfiguration”
neutral · production · nanoscopic · 2014-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our data center guys only allow us to use RHEL in production”
neutral · production · eitally · 2014-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RHEL in particular since that's what we use”
neutral · production · jsmeaton · 2013-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run these on various versions of RHEL, Debian , Ubuntu and FreeBSD”
neutral · production · noselasd · 2013-03-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We developed on macs as well, and ran RHEL in production.”
neutral · production · scottyallen · 2011-08-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Right now this is just a tar file but we plan to switch to rpms (we're on RHEL).”
neutral · production · lxt · 2011-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?