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Wow. I kind of new this day was coming. I work in engineering / science (not comp. sci or developing) and all our software vendors are Windows or RHEL support o
by happyjack 6y ago
Wow. I kind of new this day was coming. I work in engineering / science (not comp. sci or developing) and all our software vendors are Windows or RHEL support only. Although if you know your way around linux any flavor will do, but RHEL is the "standard" for support. It's kind of like "insurance." We expect this to compile / work for RHEL and NOTHING else, because RHEL is stable, predictable, and boring.
I've run most all the flavors of linux and am on the Ubuntu train. Actually, I flirted with the RHEL / Fedora / CentOS workflows as current as last year for a few months. I love the predictability and stability of RHEL on workstations and the thought of something new on a laptop or what not. While I respect the hell out of RH and their products, it just didn't work for me. Fedora is WAY too experimental, lacks supports, and is prone to your system breaking. I know, I know, it is pretty stable and has a lot of support behind it. But after updating via yum and having my WIFI stop working on my 6 year old Thinkpad, that is a deal breaker. I think there is way too much disconnect between their projects. RHEL is super stable, but the packages are severely outdated. Fedora is too experimental, and is pretty much a home operating system and a playground. I know CentOS is free, but depending on your business is paying $300 / year / machine for legitimate support and ticketing really an issue? That's for everyone to decide on their own. I think Ubuntu LTS is the best middle ground for stability and new packages. And if you need paid support and professional help, you can pay Canonical as well.
I could see this coming. CentOS didn't really show a value proposition for RH picking up the tab and supporting it. CentOS was recompiling RHEL and shipping it off; RH needs to keep their PR and image inline and HAD to help, since the whole point of CentOS was "this is RHEL without RH graphics and copyrighted material." IMO, RH felt like they were doing the same thing twice; producing RHEL, then removing RHEL branding and helping package up and compiling CentOS. Due to this, I think the biz folks scratched their on why they needed money, and now we have Centos Stream. I have no doubt another project will spin up taking up the slack of just recompiling RHEL.
Different tools for different jobs. Maybe Centos Stream will be awesome! Maybe it can fill the gap between Fedora and RHEL.
- AdmiralAsshat 6y ago> I could see this coming. CentOS didn't really show a value proposition for RH picking up the tab and supporting it. CentOS was recompiling RHEL and shipping it off; RH needs to keep their PR and image inline and HAD to help, since the whole point of CentOS was "this is RHEL without RH graphics and copyrighted material." Bear in mind that CentOS was originally an independent project until Red Hat acquired it.
- happyjack 6y agoYou are correct! I think my point is that when your independent project grows so large that is has effect on the other, the main operator (RH) has to acknowledge it and do something about ti.
- dilawar 6y agoI have been using openSUSE. It's been pretty stable on the laptop. On laptop, I use the Tumbleweed (rolling release) and 15.1 or 15.2 on servers. Give it a try.
- FeistySkink 6y agoWhat's the package management like? Does it support flatpaks? And what about LTS?
- zxspectrum1982 6y agoPackages are RPMS, managed with zypper. You may also use dnf but you will miss some of the advanced features provided by dnf (e. g. the concept of patches vs updates), there was a zypper vs dnf thread recently in the openSUSE mailing lists. It does support flatpaks. There is no free openSUSE LTS. The LTS is called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, costs some money (unless you are a developer, in that case you get free subscriptions) and the LTS lasts for a minimum of 13 years.
- happyjack 6y agoI have always wanted to try SUSE!
- zxspectrum1982 6y agoOoops, I meant "you will miss some of the advanced features provided by zypper". It's dnf what's lacking the concept of patch, and many more.
- Arnavion 6y agoOn the other hand, dnf/yum downloads repos and packages in parallel while zypper still does everything one at a time, which means every kilobyte-sized package takes a second or two each to download, from setting up and tearing down a new TCP connection each time. It's especially annoying in Tumbleweed because rolling distro == lots of tiny packages updates all the time.
- adamc 6y agoI see it as gradually hurting them, as organizations switch to other server Linux versions, and that diminishes the value of RHEL knowledge.
- happyjack 6y agoI totally agree with this. More fragmentation, less documentation / solidarity.
- m463 6y agoUbuntu phones home a lot. Don't know if that applies to rhel
- unionpivo 6y agonot the server. my biggest complaint about ubuntu server is that docker is packaged as a snap. But that takes 30s to fix (includding googling for a fix :) )
- m463 6y agoIs that ubuntu 20.04? I've used 18.04 extensively and it's just: apt-get install docker.io
- strenholme 6y agoIndeed, typing in “docker” at the Ubuntu 20.04 command line tells you the above “apt-get install docker.io” command; one does not even need to waste time with a 30 second Google/DuckDuckGo search. (Learning Ubuntu since CentOS went broke their pinky promise to supply security updates until 2029)