I would suggest Debian (for ease of migration) or Red Hat Linux (for industries that are heavily regulated by compliance).
However, with Red Hat you will most likely run into the "corporate interests" factor again.
Maybe you can think of a medium-term and a long-term solution. Begin with Debian, and then look into the feasibility of using FreeBSD. That powers some of the largest services, such as Netflix and Whatsapp.
However, FreeBSD does not use Bash but tsch, so you will want to ease the migration and administrative pains by looking into transitioning any OPS scripts and the like, but FreeBSD does provide a package management solution that holds it ground against apt/aptitude.
This is by no means a comprehensive comparison, just a few insights that might serve as starting points.
However, with Red Hat you will most likely run into the "corporate interests" factor again.
Maybe you can think of a medium-term and a long-term solution. Begin with Debian, and then look into the feasibility of using FreeBSD. That powers some of the largest services, such as Netflix and Whatsapp.
However, FreeBSD does not use Bash but tsch, so you will want to ease the migration and administrative pains by looking into transitioning any OPS scripts and the like, but FreeBSD does provide a package management solution that holds it ground against apt/aptitude.
This is by no means a comprehensive comparison, just a few insights that might serve as starting points.