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Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise? They are not done with using Linux for "a project or undertaking, typically one that is d

Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise? They are not done with using Linux for "a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort." or "a business or company." They are no longer going to use a specific version of linux that was made by "a business or company." Do people really care that much about linux distros? Between 2 decades of personal use and a few years of professional Fortune 20 use, linux seems to be linux to me. (Could just be that I have stuck to Debian flavors)

mynameisvlad 3y ago
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the name of a product. Geerling supports a massive collection of Ansible playbooks, which goes pretty far beyond anybody’s personal use of Linux and would explain why this is a bigger deal than you or I ditching support for a distro.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I've always heard it as Red Hat. Weird to see the parenthesis. I would not have cared if it said 'I'm done with red hat enterprise linux' I took it as 'I'm done with enterprise linux'
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    The parentheses means they're done with RHEL the OS and RH the company as a whole.
brightball 3y ago
Geerling is a big name in Red Hat. He’s responsible for most of the popular Ansible packages out there.
re-thc 3y ago
> Do people really care that much about linux distros? They sadly do. There's a whole wave of consultants and engineers tied to the RHEL ecosystem and wouldn't be able to install without typing "yum".
- raverbashing 3y ago
  "sadly"? Your second point is valid but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > "sadly"? In response to the origin post that Linux is Linux. Kubernetes and Docker tries really hard to hide this differentiator of Linux distros. > but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package It gets worse than that. It's a daily struggle to explain the different between npm, yarn and pnpm for example. If only they understood what is "an npm package".
- hulitu 3y ago
  Was rpm -i deprecated ? /s
- freedude 3y ago
  dnf, yum is slated to be deprecated. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_basic_system_settings/managing-software-packages_configuring-basic-system-settings https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
teilo 3y ago
Yes, we care about flavors of Linux in the enterprise. RHEL is an industry standard distribution that nearly all vendors support. We have a significant amount of commercial software that is only supported on RHEL or its derivates. Not running on a supported distro? You get no support. That’s a non-starter for mission critical systems in the enterprise. We used to be able to run this software, fully supported, on CentOS. IBM pulled the rug out from under us. Rocky and Alma rose to the occasion, and the various vendors supported one or both, since it was still RHEL minus branding. Now IBM is cutting off those distros also in an attempt to force everyone into RHEL licenses and support contracts. But because it IS Linux, after all, a lot of enterprises like mine have NEVER needed support for the OS itself. We just needed our vendors to support their software running on it, and we needed vulnarability patching on the OS, something which CentOS, Rocky, and Alma always provided. If I had my way, 100% of what we run would be on Debian. I have Debian running everywhere possible. But not all 3rd party applications support Debian. I’m hoping that one consequence of IBM’s move here will be to drive them all to Debian.
- volkadav 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm hopeful the five year support window for Debian LTS releases now will help drive that migration. I suspect though the lowest-effort path for migrating from one commercial vendor to another will be towards Canonical, given Ubuntu's LTS releases and existing infrastructure around commercial support / certified hardware compatibility lists / etc. I may not be a huge fan of some of their decisions over the years but as my objections have tended to be technical rather than business/contractual/ethical I think they'd be nicer to deal with than IBM or Oracle, heh. :)
volkadav 3y ago
There can be quite a number of distro-specific quirks to bear in mind if you're targeting more than one, enough so that as a downstream product vendor it's nice to only have one or two ideally slowly-moving targets (say, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS) to test on/document/support instead of dozens. In turn it's also nice as an end-user to have a platform with long periods of stability/support so you're not having to rebuild/retune your systems' foundational bits every year. (I have no particular dog in this fight. I mostly left the RedHat ecosystem behind a long time ago, but I understand it's still a big deal for a lot of vendors and clients. From an individual dev/user perspective, I agree that more or less as long as whatever is a posix-y environment, I can figure it out and get my work done, whether it's solaris or slackware or whatever haha.)

mynameisvlad 3y ago

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the name of a product. Geerling supports a massive collection of Ansible playbooks, which goes pretty far beyond anybody’s personal use of Linux and would explain why this is a bigger deal than you or I ditching support for a distro.

hospitalJail 3y ago
I've always heard it as Red Hat. Weird to see the parenthesis. I would not have cared if it said 'I'm done with red hat enterprise linux' I took it as 'I'm done with enterprise linux'
- Arnavion 3y ago
  The parentheses means they're done with RHEL the OS and RH the company as a whole.

brightball 3y ago

Geerling is a big name in Red Hat. He’s responsible for most of the popular Ansible packages out there.

re-thc 3y ago

> Do people really care that much about linux distros? They sadly do. There's a whole wave of consultants and engineers tied to the RHEL ecosystem and wouldn't be able to install without typing "yum".

raverbashing 3y ago
"sadly"? Your second point is valid but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package
- re-thc 3y ago
  > "sadly"? In response to the origin post that Linux is Linux. Kubernetes and Docker tries really hard to hide this differentiator of Linux distros. > but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package It gets worse than that. It's a daily struggle to explain the different between npm, yarn and pnpm for example. If only they understood what is "an npm package".
hulitu 3y ago
Was rpm -i deprecated ? /s
freedude 3y ago
dnf, yum is slated to be deprecated. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_basic_system_settings/managing-software-packages_configuring-basic-system-settings https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

teilo 3y ago

Yes, we care about flavors of Linux in the enterprise. RHEL is an industry standard distribution that nearly all vendors support. We have a significant amount of commercial software that is only supported on RHEL or its derivates. Not running on a supported distro? You get no support. That’s a non-starter for mission critical systems in the enterprise. We used to be able to run this software, fully supported, on CentOS. IBM pulled the rug out from under us. Rocky and Alma rose to the occasion, and the various vendors supported one or both, since it was still RHEL minus branding. Now IBM is cutting off those distros also in an attempt to force everyone into RHEL licenses and support contracts. But because it IS Linux, after all, a lot of enterprises like mine have NEVER needed support for the OS itself. We just needed our vendors to support their software running on it, and we needed vulnarability patching on the OS, something which CentOS, Rocky, and Alma always provided. If I had my way, 100% of what we run would be on Debian. I have Debian running everywhere possible. But not all 3rd party applications support Debian. I’m hoping that one consequence of IBM’s move here will be to drive them all to Debian.

volkadav 3y ago
Yeah, I'm hopeful the five year support window for Debian LTS releases now will help drive that migration. I suspect though the lowest-effort path for migrating from one commercial vendor to another will be towards Canonical, given Ubuntu's LTS releases and existing infrastructure around commercial support / certified hardware compatibility lists / etc. I may not be a huge fan of some of their decisions over the years but as my objections have tended to be technical rather than business/contractual/ethical I think they'd be nicer to deal with than IBM or Oracle, heh. :)

volkadav 3y ago

There can be quite a number of distro-specific quirks to bear in mind if you're targeting more than one, enough so that as a downstream product vendor it's nice to only have one or two ideally slowly-moving targets (say, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS) to test on/document/support instead of dozens. In turn it's also nice as an end-user to have a platform with long periods of stability/support so you're not having to rebuild/retune your systems' foundational bits every year. (I have no particular dog in this fight. I mostly left the RedHat ecosystem behind a long time ago, but I understand it's still a big deal for a lot of vendors and clients. From an individual dev/user perspective, I agree that more or less as long as whatever is a posix-y environment, I can figure it out and get my work done, whether it's solaris or slackware or whatever haha.)