Yes, Debian.

If you’re looking for something like this, but not paid for, try Debian stable. Same idea but free. Ubuntu also have an LTS version and I’m sure others.

The “Enterprise” in the title just means “support”, which is a check box for a lot of organisations. Not so much home users.

Not worth it imo. You’ll end up installing everything you use regularly from 3rd party repos (or building yourself) to get up to date features. Just use Fedora.

I manage a number of RHEL/Rocky and Ubuntu machines for work. EL is fine as a server distro but it doesn’t make a great desktop distro. The packages are old and I’ve found it to be missing a number of packages I use on a desktop system. For a desktop, Fedora or Ubuntu is a better fit.

I think it depends on your use case. For my gaming desktop I use Fedora to get the latest packages. For professional scenarios I’ve been using Almalinux the past couple of years. It started life as a RHEL clone, but since RHEL changed their code distribution rules I see them more parallel in the stream rather than down. It’s completely free, but there are options to purchase support and live kernel patching if required.

If you want to go the Suse route, Opensuse Leap will give you the closest experience to Suse enterprise. I believe Suse actually offers conversion tools to convert Leap to the full enterprise OS. I don’t have personal experience with it, but have considered it in the past and this is the information I recall.

More than a decade ago I bought SUSE enterprise for a couple of years just to support the project. Never needed any assistance so I’m not sure about a different experience. BTW The box was nice 🤣

We use Alma Linux at work and it’s fine, I suppose. I see two main reasons why you’d choose an EL linux distro:

1. You have (professional) software that officially supports it. RHEL’s release model makes it an attractive target for proprietary software and many vendors choose to support it.
2. You need/want very long support cycles. You can run 10-year-old software even though you probably shouldn’t.

Apart from those, it’s a competent distro, Red Hat know what they’re doing. If you want the equivalent to an Ubuntu LTS / Debian in the Fedora world, it get’s the job done. I quite like their approach of keeping the core OS stable while updating drivers, tools, and compilers (e.g., the kernel version number has very little meaning in RHEL).

Is the experience very different from Fedora?

Yes. the age of the core packages is very noticeable. The number of fully supported packages is also very small and you need to go to EPEL very quickly (at which point you’re no longer getting enterprise support…). On the plus side, it’s much more stable than Fedora in my experience.

Edit: My main recommendation for a stable distro would probably be Debian unless one of the above points applies.

Personally using rocky Linux. Which is essentially free rhel. It moves slower then fedora.

RHEL comes with very limited repos, so this might help: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/epel/

So Technically No. Our proprietary CAD was only supported and certified to work on RHEL or SUSE. I wanted to test before commiting to a distro. So I went with OpenSUSE leap since it shares SUSE binaries and has same release and service cycle. It installed and functions well on OoenSUSE While not identical to SUSE, I can say all the complaints I saw online of things not working in Linux were working for me. They sort of have to on a paid distro with support, so it seems to carry to OpenSUSE with the same binaries

1. nVidia hosts a repo specifically for SUSE and OpenSUSE ( probably RHEL too) it meany adding that nvdia url and updating in Yast2 GUI. Everything works, no tearing, no glitches, nVidia app for thermal settings or tweaking.

2)btrfs works. I saw lots of complaints of people saying btrfs filled their drive, etc. SUSE / OpenSUSE as jobs establishes to monitor number and age of snapshots and remove automatically as needed as well as cleaning tools. It all runs behind the scenes.

3. patches, people complain they don’t know if a CVE affects them, if they have applied a patch or not, what package etc. On SUSE/OoenSUSE you have several patch, patches, lp commands that show you what has been released, what level and whether your system has it installed, not required, critical etc. Keeping up with CVE and patches is easy.

I assume RHEL will also have these types of perks to make some aspects easier

i suspect that the biggest reason to use an enterprise distribution is the support since it helps shield you from the consequences of interoperability that naturally come out of the whole linux ecosystem of the right hand not knowing what the left had is doing.

I tried a couple of times but prefer fedora over redhat on lab servers and desktops. Fedora is easier to upgrade between releases and you get features faster and it’s just as stable. The only time I use enterprise oses in my lab is for things that are picky about the os they run on