If you're not an enterprise that wants a support contract, then just use Alma, Rocky, or (holds nose) Oracle Linux instead. Though if you're not an enterprise, you probably won't like RHEL because everything is so old (and "stability" is a joke: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30068505). If you like the Red Hat-ish way of doing things, then use Fedora instead.
Do you know of any specific problems with CentOS Stream? It seems like it just moves slightly faster than RHEL but ends up in the same place except for the tiny chance of an issue that isn't caught in pre-release testing. It sounds much more stable than Fedora, maybe as stable as Ubuntu LTS.
OP, you can also get RHEL for free as an individual if you're just planning to use it on a handful of systems and you're willing to make a Red Hat account and log into those systems with that account. You would have to use an account for a paid version of RHEL anyway.
> tiny chance of an issue that isn't caught in pre-release testing. It sounds much more stable than Fedora, maybe as stable as Ubuntu LTS.
CentOS Stream is the pre-release testing for RHEL.
> OP, you can also get RHEL for free as an individual if you're just planning to use it on a handful of systems and you're willing to make a Red Hat account and log into those systems with that account. You would have to use an account for a paid version of RHEL anyway.
But why go through all this trouble? Alma, Rocky, and even Oracle give you an exactly functionally equivalent distro without having to deal with the hassle of accounts or subscriptions.
Red Hat says they do a lot of testing before anything goes into CentOS Stream. That's what I meant by pre-release testing. Since the changes are intended for RHEL they're already carefully reviewing and cherry-picking everything from upstream anyway. This is a lot different from for example Debian where you have volunteers merging random snapshots from upstream into unstable, and then if that doesn't crash unstable for a week or so it's automatically moved to testing.
CentOS Stream is not for everyone and I don't know what OP's criteria are, but since they're considering Debian and Fedora and are willing to pay for RHEL then their criteria probably allows for CentOS Stream. Alma and Rocky seem okay if you're willing to trust relatively new distros, and Oracle Linux seems okay if you're willing to trust Oracle. They're all valid options depending on your needs.
Honestly that link you shared makes me more impressed with Red Hat that they would attempt to cherry-pick security fixes without picking up new incompatibilities. That's the kind of stability I wish for, and as long as these breakages are rare, them it's all good.
