Redhat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution designed for reliability and long-term binary compatibility. Redhat, Inc. took a lot of heat during the 1990s for the inadequate stability of their product. In response, they invented Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in 2000.

Community Enterprise Linux (CentOS), essentially a free version of RHEL, had its first release in 2004. These systems are created by taking a snapshot of Fedora and spending a lot of time fixing bugs, without upgrading the core tools, which might introduce new bugs. Hence, they run older kernels, compilers, and core libraries like libc.

RHEL, CentOS and their derivatives are used on the vast majority of HPC clusters.

They are also used in data centers around the world to provide all kinds of services needed to keep business, governments, and other organizations running.

One of their major advantages is full support for many commercial scientific software, most of which are supported only on Windows, Mac, and Enterprise Linux.

Enterprise Linux is also more stable than cutting-edge Linux systems. Many Linux users are unaware of this fact, because it is not relevant to them. In my own experience, most Linux systems will provide average up times of a month or two, which is far more than the average computer user needs. Many people will install updates and reboot about once a week anyway, so they will rarely experience a system crash.

One of the disadvantages of Enterprise Linux is that they use older kernels, compilers, standard libraries, and other tools. This makes it difficult to build and run the latest open source software on Enterprise Linux.

The pkgsrc package manager, discussed in the section called “Pkgsrc” can be a big help overcoming this limitation.