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The rest is even more outdated than Debian, so just use Debian.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

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.

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.

Nowadays with Flatpaks you can use any distros you want.

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.

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.

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

I've done the other way around

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.

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....

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.

Fedora is probably the closest you can practically get.