Linux

If you are willing to abandon Linux, I would suggest FreeBSD for general purpose servers.

It is a full operating system, which starts you off with a CLI, that is easy to configure. There is a full handbook that describes the full process, and it is on their website. FreeBSD is an operating system, rather than a distribution of cobbled together packages. Due to this, operating system binaries, and package binaries, are separated. This makes configuration on the OS level consistent.

A lot of Linux programs come from the BSD family. FreeBSD also has its own hypervisor, named Bhyve. FreeBSD has its own version of Docker as well, they are called jails. It might take some time to learn, but I promise it will be worth the time.

(open)SUSE

With a server in mind I'd go OpenSuse Leap.

Void Linux. It just works.

Gentoo! it can be anything you want on any platform

@bzImage For desktops/laptops my goto is https://ubuntu-mate.org/. For servers, I still use Rocky 9, a RHEL based distro, but I've been happy with Ubuntu servers as well. The ubiquity of Ubuntu just makes it easy to search for solutions to anything you encounter.

I can throw in a vote for Debian stable as well. I've recently installed Debian 12 and I've been blown away by how great it's been compared to my recent Fedora 38 experience out of box.

On my Desktop, I switched to Manjaro (Arch-based) from Mint a few years ago. Works like a charm and I like the rolling release model. On servers, Ubuntu, Debian or SUSE might be a good choice.

Every single vm in my home lab is Debian, from the minimal installer, running on proxmox which is Debian based. Every new install is ~7 minutes and has been so stable that my uptimes are only under 100% because of yearly power outages longer than my UPS can handle. Average uptime is ~half a year on each box.

There are several options. Alma/Rocky, Fedora, Debian, BSD, just to name a few.

For all my non-compliant, non-supported hosts I started using Fedora CoreOS quite successfully.

If you package your applications as containers, you should have a very easy time with it. It's based off ostree, which means a couple of things:

• immutable (so not easy to break, I guess?)
• atomic upgrades, which means you upgrade in a single step
• atomic and full rollbacks, which means if an upgrade breaks your host, you can rollback to the exact previous version booted simply by choosing it from grub
• still based on rpm, so you will still have a grasp of it, even though many things are completely different
• other benefits I forgot, I'm sure :)

All with the added benefit that once you go towards containers you can change your distro with minimal effort, so there's that.

I'm a long time Opensuse user ~~but that is also somewhat RedHat based I think~~ . Highly recommend it, though. Have been using it on a server since 2014 and just kept updating through all the opensuse versions since then without problems. Exceptionally stable.

Also use it on my work laptop and I'm also with that very satisfied regarding stability and usability.

Edit: it's based on Slackware and not redhat.

This question is just going to draw a lot of "hey what's your favourite distro" responses.

But if you want something EL-like that isn't RHEL, consider the bastard child of Conectiva and Mandrake, long ejected from the RedHat family but still very similar -- PCLinuxOS. It has the superior signed packaging format, and it has much of the same workflow. Its packer compatibility suffers greatly from its mageia times - I think - so they're still a bit ghetto about anything at scale, but that's almost the only thing they don't have nailed-down. Their massive compatibility window delivers on everything AppStream claims but cannot.

For minimal stuff, consider AlpineLinux, which also is free of Systemd and still manages to run really well for reasons Lennart's fans simply can't understand.