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Add to SafariWhen comparing NixOS vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Slant community recommends NixOS for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for misanthropes?” NixOS is ranked 55th while Red Hat Enterprise Linux is ranked 115th. The most important reason people chose NixOS is:
Atomic non-destructive upgrades / rollback of a system upgrade / declarative reproducible system configuration / unprivileged installation of packages / transparent source or binary deployment.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro State of the art package manager
Atomic non-destructive upgrades / rollback of a system upgrade / declarative reproducible system configuration / unprivileged installation of packages / transparent source or binary deployment.
Pro Minimal
You can start with a minimal environment and add packages and software to suit your needs as you go along.
Pro Reproducible system
NixOS is configured using the Nix package manager, allowing your system to be replicated and kept in sync across multiple machines. Great for keeping a laptop and desktop in sync.
Pro Robust
Packages don't break after a NixOS upgrade as they are prone to with other distros (especially Arch).
Pro Each version is supported for a really long time
Each released version of RHEL is supported for around ten years by Red Hat with constant bug fixes and security updates.
Pro Greatly favours stability over anything else
RHEL favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.
Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.
This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left RHEL unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Pro Rapid security updates
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
RHEL has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since RHEL backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Best support as far as hardware goes
This distro is by far the one with the largest number of certified server-class hardware.
Pro Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
Cons
Con Documentation is not good
A lot of the documentation of various functions is buried on the source code, their respective manuals, or non-existent. The documentation, the conventions, and the scattered toolchain really made searching for stuff easily missable.
Con A configuration change might end up bricking your system
Con You need to buy a license
RHEL is a commercial Linux distributions and it's rather expensive as well, the cheapest license costs $349.
