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From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they

From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.

Postosuchus 4y ago
Wrong. Two reasons actually: 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support. 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.
- hackmiester 4y ago
  I don't think "Wrong" is a very interesting, helpful, or productive response to someone's lived experience.
  - mmcgaha 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - flextheruler 4y ago
      Are you stating that someone’s identity is an excuse for them being disagreeable
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Isn't that the current definition of neuro-divergent tolerance?
    - nimih 4y ago
      Wrong. Two reasons, actually: 1. Culture is a dynamic and malleable thing, and through thoughtful criticism, it's possible to help people not be pedantic assholes on internet message boards. 2. If a post is both unnecessarily abrasive, and doesn't meaningfully engage with the post it's responding to, it adds no value to the conversation, and thus is not worth defending.
- btilly 4y ago
  My experience disagrees strongly. 1. Debian always had more stability and predictability than Red Hat in practice. Too much so. The Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it because it was not a company. 2. My impression was again that Debian was technically better than RedHat in every way I might care about. We happily installed it at $work, and the experienced Unix sysadmins I knew could use RedHat but didn't like it so much.
  - worik 4y ago
    > Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it [Debian] because it was not a company. IIRC Debian maintainers formed companies for that reason. I was a Debian user because it suited me. It was obvious (to me at the time) that suits were going to choose RedHat, and we ran it a bit to have experience. How wrong I was. Ubuntu made Debian every bit as much as a "choice of the suits" as Redhat.
bartchamdo 4y ago
It looks like RHEL zealots never die from the other people’s comments. RHEL had plenty of problems just like all the other OSes and distros.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- surge 4y ago
  I think you're romanticizing it. Until RHEL and LTS releases for Debian/Ubuntu, most distros you never knew if running and update was going to break something because there simply wasn't effective quality control testing in the hobbyist distros. Best you could do was run a version behind, but that hurt if you needed security updates. There were plenty of people and small highly knowledgeable shops and academics that thought 6 hours fixing a bug after custom compiling a patch was fine and normal (and a RHEL subscription at least meant RedHat would have a team doing that part for you if absolutely necessary), but its not the way companies operated. RHEL at least meant whatever release was stable and an actual QA team put patches through their paces on various hardware and configurations (especially those enterprise high end server configs with special SCSI/RAID controllers, high end network cards, and other chipset other distros simply didn't have the means to test on). The QA/support team wasn't bug reports and guys on usenet going "it works for me, you should have gotten the exact same hardware I have, or be willing to go through the code and figure it out and patch it, and submit it to the source, like a good user should". Or tell you go back to Micro$oft if you want support for your storage controller that the kernel module for worked fine in the last version. Those were the zealots, the rest were sys admins with too much other things on their hands to do than deal with Slackware or whatever the hot distro was on distrowatch.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    My Redhat experience always seemed to devolve into "this package that I want has a dependency that isn't listed yet..." (cue 2 hours of recursively and manually tracking down dependencies on the early web). But I was a lot younger and didn't know a lot of what I do now, so was probably doing everything RPM wrong.
unixhero 4y ago
You are not wrong...

From my experience as a Linux sysadmin? RedHat ran half the planet because they had the best sales force and legal team (as exhibited by my example), but they did not have the best technology.

Postosuchus 4y ago

Wrong. Two reasons actually: 1. RHEL was the first distro directed at enterprise deployment (meaning, strong preference of rock solid stability and predictability over constant churn). Which made it the only distro Dells and HPs of the world recognized and agreed to support. 2. RHEL was created on legacy of RedHat Linux, which was the best distro for non-hobbyist environments (from reproducible deployments to the breadth of packages available) - since 3.0.3 onwards. RedHat JUST. WORKED.

hackmiester 4y ago
I don't think "Wrong" is a very interesting, helpful, or productive response to someone's lived experience.
- mmcgaha 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - flextheruler 4y ago
    Are you stating that someone’s identity is an excuse for them being disagreeable
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Isn't that the current definition of neuro-divergent tolerance?
  - nimih 4y ago
    Wrong. Two reasons, actually: 1. Culture is a dynamic and malleable thing, and through thoughtful criticism, it's possible to help people not be pedantic assholes on internet message boards. 2. If a post is both unnecessarily abrasive, and doesn't meaningfully engage with the post it's responding to, it adds no value to the conversation, and thus is not worth defending.
btilly 4y ago
My experience disagrees strongly. 1. Debian always had more stability and predictability than Red Hat in practice. Too much so. The Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it because it was not a company. 2. My impression was again that Debian was technically better than RedHat in every way I might care about. We happily installed it at $work, and the experienced Unix sysadmins I knew could use RedHat but didn't like it so much.
- worik 4y ago
  > Dells and HPs of the world didn't recognize it [Debian] because it was not a company. IIRC Debian maintainers formed companies for that reason. I was a Debian user because it suited me. It was obvious (to me at the time) that suits were going to choose RedHat, and we ran it a bit to have experience. How wrong I was. Ubuntu made Debian every bit as much as a "choice of the suits" as Redhat.

bartchamdo 4y ago

It looks like RHEL zealots never die from the other people’s comments. RHEL had plenty of problems just like all the other OSes and distros.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
surge 4y ago
I think you're romanticizing it. Until RHEL and LTS releases for Debian/Ubuntu, most distros you never knew if running and update was going to break something because there simply wasn't effective quality control testing in the hobbyist distros. Best you could do was run a version behind, but that hurt if you needed security updates. There were plenty of people and small highly knowledgeable shops and academics that thought 6 hours fixing a bug after custom compiling a patch was fine and normal (and a RHEL subscription at least meant RedHat would have a team doing that part for you if absolutely necessary), but its not the way companies operated. RHEL at least meant whatever release was stable and an actual QA team put patches through their paces on various hardware and configurations (especially those enterprise high end server configs with special SCSI/RAID controllers, high end network cards, and other chipset other distros simply didn't have the means to test on). The QA/support team wasn't bug reports and guys on usenet going "it works for me, you should have gotten the exact same hardware I have, or be willing to go through the code and figure it out and patch it, and submit it to the source, like a good user should". Or tell you go back to Micro$oft if you want support for your storage controller that the kernel module for worked fine in the last version. Those were the zealots, the rest were sys admins with too much other things on their hands to do than deal with Slackware or whatever the hot distro was on distrowatch.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  My Redhat experience always seemed to devolve into "this package that I want has a dependency that isn't listed yet..." (cue 2 hours of recursively and manually tracking down dependencies on the early web). But I was a lot younger and didn't know a lot of what I do now, so was probably doing everything RPM wrong.

unixhero 4y ago

You are not wrong...