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Downside of RHEL is the package repo is anemic and out of date. Sometimes horribly out of date. It's hardly uncommon to run into some issue with an applicatio

Downside of RHEL is the package repo is anemic and out of date. Sometimes horribly out of date. It's hardly uncommon to run into some issue with an application and then look it up online and find out that the fix was applied 8 versions after the one that's in the repo. Worse is when you start grabbing code off of Git and the configure script bombs out because it wants a library two versions ahead of the one in the repo. But you don't want to upgrade it because obviously that's going to cause an issue with whatever installed that library originally. So now you're thinking about containers but that adds more complication... Like everything it is a double edged sword.

steelframe 5y ago
I have had luck running Debian Stable with apps from Snap when the older .deb from the repo doesn't cut it. I haven't found that setup at all complicated.
flatiron 5y ago
This use case begs for arch. Not bloated and up to date upstream and AUR is very robust for the “one off” apps. Rhel on desktop makes sense for development for rhel on servers. Can’t think really of any other use case. At least they could try out centos stream? For all its hate it’s really nice for certain use cases. Although people are religiously against it (rh needs to really work on that before it dies on the vine)
- touristtam 5y ago
  Why go all the way to Arch when Fedora is perfectly serviceable? Used it for a few years before being imposed a MBP.
  - pxc 5y ago
    any RHEL user who is happy switching to Arch probably never appreciated what's actualltly good about Red Hat's tooling
- dralley 5y ago
  CentOS Stream doesn't significantly change the up-to-date-ness of the packages. It's a few months ahead of RHEL, but RHEL (minor releases) move at the same pace as always, which is to say slowly, so a few months ahead is insignificant. Fedora is probably better if you want up-to-date packages on a platform that's relatively similar to production.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I run Arch on my homelab, and the AUR is a lifesaver. Not to mention, the basic Arch repos contain more Podman Cockpit modules than apt, to my surprise. Very nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.
  - pxc 5y ago
    > [Arch is a v]ery nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman. if you're running a homelab and regularly 'wrangling' a package manager which is broken/incomplete by design, why are you choosing distros based on package availability rather than on the quality of the tooling? surely you can package anything you need to use
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      I could, but the time I'd spend getting it working on a stable distro vastly outweighs the time I'd spend setting up my pacman.conf and backing it up to git. When I say 'wrangle', I'm more talking about the instability and frequency of updates. It's definitely only for homelab use, I wouldn't ever consider deploying this on a larger scale.
      - pxc 5y ago
        I guess preexisting availability is important when you don't know what you'll want to use, and you're also interested in trying a lot of things that you may not want to keep around for long

steelframe 5y ago

I have had luck running Debian Stable with apps from Snap when the older .deb from the repo doesn't cut it. I haven't found that setup at all complicated.

flatiron 5y ago

This use case begs for arch. Not bloated and up to date upstream and AUR is very robust for the “one off” apps. Rhel on desktop makes sense for development for rhel on servers. Can’t think really of any other use case. At least they could try out centos stream? For all its hate it’s really nice for certain use cases. Although people are religiously against it (rh needs to really work on that before it dies on the vine)

touristtam 5y ago
Why go all the way to Arch when Fedora is perfectly serviceable? Used it for a few years before being imposed a MBP.
- pxc 5y ago
  any RHEL user who is happy switching to Arch probably never appreciated what's actualltly good about Red Hat's tooling
dralley 5y ago
CentOS Stream doesn't significantly change the up-to-date-ness of the packages. It's a few months ahead of RHEL, but RHEL (minor releases) move at the same pace as always, which is to say slowly, so a few months ahead is insignificant. Fedora is probably better if you want up-to-date packages on a platform that's relatively similar to production.
smoldesu 5y ago
I run Arch on my homelab, and the AUR is a lifesaver. Not to mention, the basic Arch repos contain more Podman Cockpit modules than apt, to my surprise. Very nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman.
- pxc 5y ago
  > [Arch is a v]ery nice OS for server stuff if you're brave enough to wrangle pacman. if you're running a homelab and regularly 'wrangling' a package manager which is broken/incomplete by design, why are you choosing distros based on package availability rather than on the quality of the tooling? surely you can package anything you need to use
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    I could, but the time I'd spend getting it working on a stable distro vastly outweighs the time I'd spend setting up my pacman.conf and backing it up to git. When I say 'wrangle', I'm more talking about the instability and frequency of updates. It's definitely only for homelab use, I wouldn't ever consider deploying this on a larger scale.
    - pxc 5y ago
      I guess preexisting availability is important when you don't know what you'll want to use, and you're also interested in trying a lot of things that you may not want to keep around for long