You will also not struggle to find support organizations that you can pay for help. You can easily find help on the Internet. CentOS has wide community support and familiarity.

This is not a distribution that someone assembles in their garage (not that I have any personal opposition to such an endeavor, but almost every organization places a premium on stability and longevity in their suppliers) With that particular need mitigated, CentOS has these strengths: The rest will call some sort of service provider, like a local IT outsourcer. The ones that will make such a call tend to work for bigger organizations that pay for RHEL or the like. However, I also know from experience that relatively few administrators ever call for operating system support. CentOS doesn’t have that kind of direct backing. That guarantees that if you’re ever really stuck on something, there will be at least one professional organization that you can pay to assist you. One of the reasons that I chose Ubuntu was its ownership by a commercial entity. With Red Hat being sensitive to the concept of free (as in what you normally think of when you hear “free”) being permanently attached to Linux in the collective conscience, they also make most of RHEL available to the CentOS Project. As a commercial venture attempting to remain profitable, Red Hat decided to create “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” (RHEL) which you must pay to use. At one time, there was simply “Red Hat Linux”. I’ve been using Red Hat’s products off and on for many years and have some degree of familiarity with them. However, there are many other popular distributions available and I like to branch my knowledge.

I’ve written in the past about using Ubuntu Server as a guest. I’m not a strong advocate for any particular distribution. If you don’t have such a mandate, you might need to make that decision yourself. If you have an organizational need for a particular distribution, then someone already made your choice for you. Microsoft provides direct support for Hyper-V running several Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD. Linux-on-Hyper-V has featured prominently on that list for a while now, and the improvements continue to roll in. Net code for Linux, we can run MS SQL on Linux, Linux containers will run natively in Windows containers… the list just keeps growing. We can now run PowerShell on Linux, we can write. Microsoft continues turning greater attention to Linux. It has been fully updated to be current as of August 2019. Note: This article was originally published on May 2017.

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