I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro.
I’m sorry I’m just venting, do you people think Ubuntu will work for me? I think I will try it next.
I wrote a long reply but looks like posting it glitched. I’ll try shortening. I should have noted that the Certification on SUSE and RHEL, is also a certification compatibility matrix. distro ver to software ver, and Siemens needs stable Windows, SUSE, RHEL releases to code to. Trying to install/running on other distros fails in many areas (even with an experiences guru trying fixes). They have a symbiotic relationahip with those curated distros to ensure it doesnt give downtime to a large enterprise. It is not just a piece of paper saying yes we tested the software install here is your signoff. Personally I did get it running on OpenSUSE for obvious reasons.
I wouldn’t use “certified” in this context.
Limiting support of software to specific software configurations makes sense.
Its stuff like Debian might be using Python 3.8 Ubuntu Python 3.9, OpenSuse Python 3.9, etc… Your application might use a Python 3.9 requiring library and act odd on 3.8 but fine on 3.7, etc… so only supporting X distributions let you make the test/QA process sane.
This is also why Docker/Flatpack exist since you can define all of this.
However the normal mix is RHEL/Suse/Ubuntu because those target businesses and your target market will most likely be running one.
Yeah it is a Known Known and those 3 distros have tried and true reliability. The term certified is what they call it “Certified to run on X” and “Compatibility CertifIcation” it was in response to OP asking if linux is used in corporate world. It is, and for larger operations it is the 3 you mention. Personally I think Ubuntu hasn’t made it into the Corporate Desktop apps like SUSE/REL because you install it and have a hairy hippo or faceted cougar head as the backdrop, just doesn’t sit well with CEO stuffed shirt types when looking for a professional software.