Red Hat Enterprise Linux: LSB Certification Means Stability, Lower Cost

I've been a professional UNIX/Linux systems administrator for 18 years now. I have to implement, maintain and support servers from all of the "enterprise" distributions and a few distributions not generally used in the enterprise as well for my employers and customers. I'm a big advocate for Red Hat and the various free clones (CentOS, Scientific Linux, Springdale Linux) as the best solution out there. First, it's stable. Second, it offers the longest support period. Third, they have excellent and professional support.* Fourth, they do the best job at insuring compatibility with both FOSS and commercial apps during the full 10 year release cycle.

My big issue with SUSE (SLES/SLED) is that they do push major version changes of the kernel, tool chain and apps in what they euphemistically call Service Packs. The Service Packs are actually major releases recently and have been known to cause major breakage and pain. My experience with their support organization here in the U.S. has been less than satisfactory, both in terms of expertise and time needed to respond to and resolve issues.

Canonical (Ubuntu) has much shorter support periods than either Red Hat or SUSE. They also don't backport additional hardware support or patches into their kernel, forcing you to either do the SUSE style update gamble even more frequently than with SUSE or else to run without needed support and/or vulnerabilities.

Finally, I'm sure fans of Debian and Slackware packaging will disagree with me, but keeping to standards, specifically the LSB, also goes a long way to insure application compatibility. I think it's vital that all enterprise distros follow standards.