> I tried to use Centos long term, that was a disaster.

What was a disaster about it? I would expect pain crossing major versions, but you could plausibly have installed CentOS on a machine and just stayed there for 5-10 years with nothing more than the odd `yum update && reboot` and I would have thought it would be fine.

Usually the pain comes when you find you need to use a feature in some software and the feature wasn't introduced until after the version that Centos ships. This happens more often than you might expect. Even fairly "modern" versions of Centos come with some really old and crusty packages.

Yeah, that's fair. I guess I was reading it as a complaint that the existing system had issues, but EL certainly has a painful tendency to not keep up with new stuff (which is rather the point, but that doesn't make it not painful:])

After a while I believe there were no more updates for Centos 7. What is impressive about this story is that I was able to drag it into the modern era with rocky linux 9 but it was a ... rocky transition. My biggest pain point was when the networking stack was broken and Yum refuses to do ANYTHING without loading sources from the network. I couldn't get around it without flash driving RPMs to the server..

The uptime of the machine was great on Centos, but it came to a point I was afraid to reboot because of the package changes that could apply.

edit: I think some software I was using was EOL'd just for Centos maybe also prompting the switch.

CentOS 7 "active support" ended in 2020 (which I'm guessing is what you mean?) but it's supposed to keep getting security support until 2024 (thus hilariously outliving both CentOS 8 and CentOS Stream 8) - https://endoflife.date/centos

Although certainly I can sympathize with the software eventually getting very long in the tooth, and jumping EL 7 to 9 could definitely be quite a change.