I use Amazon Linux 2 as the operating system on EC2 in AWS and I like that it is stable and lightweight. The stability gives us peace of mind because we don't have to restart servers or see strange errors. Since it is lightweight, small EC2 instances work well for simple apps without needing to pay more. Amazon Linux 2 is optimized for AWS, so it is easy to configure and there is no need to deal with licenses. Also, security updates arrive quickly and without breaking anything, and AWS repositories are very fast, which means I don't have to wait long to install or update something. Additionally, since it is made by AWS, it already has the agents pre-installed for use with CloudWatch or Systems Manager, which makes monitoring and management easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes the packages come older than in other distros, you have to resort to extra yum repos or compile manually. And it doesn't run outside of AWS, so if you want to replicate the environment locally, it's somewhat tedious. It also doesn't have as much community documentation as Ubuntu or RHEL. The versions of Python or Node sometimes come old and we have to install with nvm or pyenv. Also, Postgres comes in a version that is no longer used as much. That forces you to add extra steps to the setup, it's not serious but it's noise. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.