Get Over Yourself and Support the Distro
Arch on my desktop. Debian in the lab. RHEL and Ubuntu at work. Three different distros, three different jobs, zero patience left for people who think that's a contradiction.
Here's my setup, in case it matters:
- Desktop: Arch, via CachyOS. Because it's my machine and I'll build it exactly how I want.
- Homelab: Debian. Because it's boring and it doesn't break, and boring-that-doesn't-break is the entire point of a homelab.
- Work: RHEL and/or Ubuntu, on Kubernetes via Tanzu. Because that's what's on the floor, and nobody asked me to vote.
That last one is what this post is actually about.
No, I don't love IBM. No, I don't love Canonical. Doesn't matter.
I'll say it once so nobody has to wonder: IBM buying Red Hat in 2019 was a gut punch to a lot of us who watched CentOS Stream happen and the source-access rules tighten and thought, correctly, that the deal had changed underneath us. Canonical shipping Snap as a load-bearing default, wrapping it in a proprietary backend, and shrugging off the telemetry complaints isn't exactly a masterclass in respecting the user either.
I know. You know. Everybody who's been doing this more than five years knows.
None of it changes what I run at 9 AM on a Monday, and none of it should change what you run either. This is the part where a lot of engineers go off the rails: they let a corporate grudge decide their skill set. That's not principle, that's just cutting off your own career to spite a logo.
This is what the business runs. Get over it.
Enterprise didn't standardize on RHEL because it's fun. It standardized on RHEL because of the support contract, the compliance paper trail, and a phone number to call when production is on fire at 3 AM. It standardized on Ubuntu LTS because of the cloud-image coverage, the hardware support, and a five-year support clock procurement can plan around.
Nobody in that decision chain asked whether dnf sparks joy. Nobody's going to. Your feelings about the packaging format are not a line item, and treating them like one is a great way to make yourself irrelevant to the people signing your paycheck.
You don't get a vote on the enterprise stack. You get a job to do on top of it. Learn the difference early, it'll save you a lot of wasted outrage.
The distro is not your personality
I've been doing this since 1994. Three decades across platform engineering, release engineering, and product leadership, and the pattern never changes: the engineers who get stuck are the ones who built an identity out of a package manager instead of building actual skill.
If you actually know Linux — systemd units, cgroups, how a filesystem hierarchy is supposed to behave, how init and networking and permissions really work underneath the branding — then RHEL, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, and whatever shows up next year are the same operating system in different outfits. apt vs. dnf vs. pacman is a shell-prompt argument. It is not an architecture argument, and it is definitely not a personality.
The people who struggle the moment they land in an enterprise shop are, without exception, the ones whose entire mental model of "Linux" was actually just a mental model of one distro's defaults. That's not expertise. That's a hobby wearing expertise's jacket.
Run what you love. Support what pays you.
I run Arch at home because I like control and I like building things myself. I run Debian in the lab because I like things that don't page me at 2 AM. I run RHEL and Ubuntu at work because that's the job, full stop, and being good at the job means being good at what's actually on the floor — not what I'd have picked if anyone had asked, which they didn't.
If your whole personality is Arch elitism, or systemd hatred, or "I only run something nobody's heard of," drop it. Not because the opinions are wrong. Because they're dead weight. Nobody's paying you to have a favorite init system. They're paying you to walk into whatever environment they hand you and be useful in it by lunch.
Love your distro at home. Support the one on the floor at work. If you can't tell those two relationships apart, that's not a Linux problem. That's a you problem.