Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2025: Making Linux do more

On most computers, there’s the feeling that there’s a one-to-one relationship between you and your operating system. You want to do a task, your operating system makes it possible by opening a window and launching an application. In IT, that balance doesn’t exist. Hundreds and thousands of tasks are required at any given moment. It’s up to the operating system to manage it, and it’s your job to manage the operating system. Amazingly, with the emergence of cloud computing, IT infrastructure is subject to even more demands than before. The operating system you choose essentially becomes your infrastructure, which is why Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is designed to do more for you and your network than ever before.

RHEL is Linux that helps you succeed

When you choose a Linux to bring into your business or your personal career development, it makes sense to choose one that’s designed to help you succeed at your job. There’s no secret to RHEL (literally — it’s open source), and it’s a pretty simple formula. Red Hat identifies common, everyday challenges faced by a modern company, and builds solutions into RHEL so that keeping your infrastructure running requires less work from you and your team.

You can theoretically do the same thing yourself with any Linux distribution, but then you’re developing a Linux distribution instead of solving problems. It’s not your job to follow the trends and develop a response to them, that’s what Red Hat does for you. Red Hat pushes RHEL to do more because you need it to do more.

Embracing change instead of fighting it

Ubiquity doesn’t imply quality. There’s software out there that’s been installed on lots of devices, and it might do the job but it often stagnates. That’s partly because many software vendors interpret reliability to mean unchanging. It’s the old mentality that something that worked well enough yesterday ought to be good enough for today. RHEL development never stops, because change is constant.

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RHEL is everywhere. It runs the cloud, it drives the data center, it’s on the edge, it’s on developer workstations and it’s at the forefront of open source. Red Hat doesn’t confuse reliability with stagnation. RHEL remains reliable because it’s based on a solid foundation that’s been driving computing and the Internet for almost half a century. However, the technology Red Hat delivers is brand new, built for the modern world.

Red Hat technology changes in response to a changing computing environment, and always has. It’s adapted for the rise of the Internet back in the 1990s, the rise of mobile computing in the 2000s, the evolution of virtualization and the cloud in the 2010s, and containers and AI in the 2020s. RHEL hasn’t remained unchanged, it’s demonstrated how change is necessary for constant reliability.

Choosing the right Linux

If you’ve used any Linux distribution at all, by Red Hat or otherwise, then you’ve almost certainly used Red Hat technology. Code written at Red Hat goes back upstream. Leading Linux engineers work at Red Hat, and everyone benefits from it.

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You can use this same philosophy when planning your infrastructure. If you’ve been in IT for any number of years, then you’ve encountered the dreaded not-invented-here syndrome. Somebody develops a custom solution for a common problem, and now it’s your job to learn and adopt it. It’s effectively proprietary knowledge, if only by obscurity. While it’s fun to invent new ways to solve common problems, it’s easier to use a tried, tested and universal solution. Standardize on RHEL, and you can have confidence that the systems you build can continue working for you and your team well into the future.

There are plenty of challenges out there without solutions that are more demanding of your time.

If it’s important, it gets RHEL

It can be difficult to quantify Red Hat’s impact on Linux. You can look at the number of lines of code committed, or the number of CVEs solved, or the number of installs on major computing platforms or whatever metric you prefer, but the ultimate test is what happens in the server room on a day to day basis. It’s not uncommon (or surprising) that when something’s deemed mission critical, it gets a RHEL install. Maybe it’s for the support, or the reliability, or the updates or the convenience of the tooling, but RHEL is trusted in the most intense environments. It’s a common thread through IT. When you adopt RHEL, you adopt something you’re going to use throughout your career.

Success story: UPS streamlines package tracking and delivery with Red Hat

Endless possibilities

RHEL isn’t just an operating system you can run on servers, containers and edge devices. It’s a central hub to plan out your network, automating important and repetitive tasks. It’s the part of your computer that lets you work efficiently and to scale your solutions. RHEL is the enterprise Linux that does more.