These days, you also have the options of Flatpaks and Distrobox. Do not nearly as big a problem as previously. No need to build from source.
I mean, for most things, why even rely on EPEL when you can install something like Arch in Distrobox. A super stable base with totally up to date apps is a great combination.
I know pretty much everyone knows this but distros like Alma and Rocky give you a pretty much identical experience to RHEL for free.
And RHEL itself is free for individuals.
The biggest difference between Fedora and RHEL is that the packages in Fedora change far more frequently, are much more up to date, and are supported for a far shorter period of time.
Even more than Busybox, Alpine uses MUSL. So, not very GNU at all.
Much more stable but much, much older packages at some point. Can you tolerate that?
It is a lot easier these days as Distrobox and Flatpak offer great escape hatches to get newer software when you really need it.
Some of us fiddle with the base OS more than we should. In many ways, I think using something that changes less often is a great idea.
One great thing about RHEL is the documentation. First Red Hat themselves make great stuff. Then there are mountains of third-party materials. Finally, since it changes slowly, whatever issues you are facing have probably been seen before by others and what you find about it on the Internet will still apply.
If you do try Haiku, use Falkon as the web browser. You will have a much better experience than the other Haiku browser options.
If you are a low-end Linux enthusiast, I would also recommend the Trinity desktop. Just as MATE is a continuation of GNOME 2, Trinity is a modern version of KDE 3. I was quite surprised how light and functional it is.
If you want to give it a shot in a VM, the Q4OS distro includes it as a default DE option. If you really want to be impressed what can be done with little RAM, try the 32 bit version of Q4OS.
What do you think of Thunar? I know it is part of XFCE but I think it would fit in well on MATE.
MATE is a bit heavier than XFCE.
I don’t love the default XFCE look but the default in distros like EndeavourOS or CachyOS are awesome. It is like a totally different DE.
I am not sure how I feel about it but there seems to be some resistance in the GTK world. Desktops like Cinnamon,MATE, and XFCE have said they are going to stick with GTK3. Mint has proposed a common suite of GTK3 apps called Xapps that would maintain GTK3 versions of some of the applications that GNOME has pulled to GTK4.
https://linuxmint-developer-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/xapps.html
One of the best things about the GTK world was that you had a choice of DEs but got the same universe of “native” applications with any of them. Sadly, it seems that there may now be GNOME and “other GTK” DE universes. On the plus side, there will be a haven for those that want off the GNOME train without as much “left behind” feel as MATE users have had.
Except the businesses run by people
This is for Azure. They care about it more than Windows these days.