What is enterprise operating system anyway?

* long term support (e.g. don't EOL something just because it's 5 years old, etc)

* immediate support (have someone you can call 24/7 if your system blows up)

* responsive support (have engineers on staff to close support tickets fairly quickly. This applies especially to bugfixes)

* good QA process so that you do not use your enterprise customers as free QA but pay people to test the product thoroughly before releasing it. This ties into the notion of long term support as something that stays in the QA matrix and receives bugfixes/updates.

* good documentation, in multiple languages

* A supporting ecosystem of certifications/training materials, so a business can hire people qualified to use the product

All of the above boils down to having people on staff doing all the boring, costly things that reduce the pain of companies using the software. Those things are not fun, so they tend not to happen consistently by open source volunteers, so they have to be paid for, hence "enterprise", as end users don't value these enough to pay for them over free but big businesses do.

> e.g. don't EOL something just because it's 5 years old, etc

How about "Don't say at release time that you'll support something for 10 years, and then change your mind a year later and say that you'll be dropping support in a year?"

(Yeah, I'm still not over that)

For the purposes of avoiding trademark infringement all RHEL clones go out of their way to avoid mentioning Red Hat, thusly Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all derived from its sources tend to get lumped together as “Enterprise Linux”

Sure, but what makes Rocky "enterprise"? Is it just marketing or can everything be "enterprise"? Is Windows not "enterprise"?

To me, being "enterprise" means shipping/supporting running enterprise functions on the OS. So things like network information services, databases, perhaps giving options of filesystems that can handle extremely large sizes, cluster support, added support from the vendor, etc.

Stuff that a typical desktop user probably won't run or use. Maybe they can if they really wanted to, but not the common use case.

>Is Windows not "enterprise"?

Funny you ask when Microsoft literally sells a version of Windows called "Windows Enterprise". https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/compare

Find the differences between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Enterprise and that may help you understand what makes Rocky Linux also enterprise.

Rocky aim for “bug for bug” compatibility with RHEL.

Red Hat target RHEL to a conservative, enterprise audience who look for a long lived well supported operating system, Rocky (and CentOS before it) court the same audience.

The primary difference being that RHEL is a premium product differentiated by the Red Hat support, training and documentation offering.

Support in so far as Red Hat will work with you to troubleshoot your OS issues, and issue custom patches to the packages they supply that you’re encountering issues with etc etc.

Training in that Red Hat offer many training courses and certifications in the usage and deployment of their many software packages and collections (System Administration, Troubleshooting & Diagnosis, High Availability Cluster administration etc etc)

If you look at Microsoft’s offering for Windows server you’ll see many parallels in the offerings that Red Hat present.

Being based on Red Hat by way of CentOS, who's full name initial-ized as RHEL is "Red Hat Enterprise Linux"

* Long-term stability and ABI guarantees. A software / hardware stack for a platform that isn't going to change or break underneath your feet while still receiving bugfixes and security updates for multiple years.

* A software stack that large third-party vendors of software and hardware are willing to certify their products against, e.g. SAP, databases, etc.

* Support contracts

In my world: Something that comes with and 24/7 support contract.