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I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got

I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got bought by IBM. IBM turned every last one into the shittiest enterprise software trash you can imagine. Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything, I'm understating it: I make a significant premium on my salary because I'm one of the few people willing to put up with it. My only expectation here is that I'll finally start weaning myself off terraform, I guess.

throwaway2037 2y ago
How is Red Hat going after the acquisition by IBM? From my view, it is going well. The enterprise product (RHEL) is still excellent.
- dralley 2y ago
  It's going basically fine. If you're in engineering you would never notice the difference.
  - sverhagen 2y ago
    Companies are often brought in and told that nothing will change, and as long as they can pull their weight, this may be true. IBM seems a pretty diversified company, and there RedHat doing 5% of the total revenue may not be too bad. I don't know how well RedHat is doing commercially, but a few bad quarters could draw negative attention of the sort where upper-management wants to start messing with you, seek more synergy, efficiency, alignment. Being a much smaller small company within Verizon, having been left alone for a little while, we were then told that The Hug was coming. It did. We didn't grow to be their next billion dollar business unit (as no surprise to anyone in our little company), nor were we able to complement other products (ha! synergy!) and we were shuttered. At some point... engineering will notice.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Dropping CentOS was a terrible decision. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the acquisition though.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    It mostly happened afterwards but it was not driven by IBM.
  - SEJeff 2y ago
    Centos stream still exists and it is in fact the actual upstream of rhel.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      But for all practical purposes, that is dropping CentOS. They completely changed the identity of the product, so the fact it has the same branding isn't going to placate anyone.
      - carlwgeorge 2y ago
        People that actually care about the distro being sustainable are quite happy with the changes. Sorry you don't get it.
    - vrighter 2y ago
      so? That just means that it is not necessarily compatible with the current version of rhel deployed on our servers
      - carlwgeorge 2y ago
        It's the same major version, so it's extremely compatible. Plus if you run into something that doesn't work the same, you just discovered what's going to break for your workload on your RHEL system when the next minor version is released.
        2y ago
- iwontberude 2y ago
  RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.
  - cmdlinecowboy 2y ago
    RHEL 10 beta has some interesting stuff in it. Running the OS itself as a container caught my eye.
  - dralley 2y ago
    Image mode RHEL is a pretty significant investment. Apart from that, in terms of keeping RHEL relevant, most of the attention is on making it easier to operate fleets at scale rather than the OS itself. Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, services in general, etc. Those are the key things that would keep it competitive against Ubuntu, Debian, Alma, Oracle etc.
  - esseph 2y ago
    This is clearly someone that is not paying attention to what Red Hat is doing. RHEL is the enterprise gold standard. Fedora is a lot of the pipeline for it, which itself has become an incredible server and desktop platform. All the work with Open shift, backstage, podman / qubelet, etc. They're going to be fine, from my graybeard position.
    - iwontberude 2y ago
      Yes also a gray beard and been around long enough to tell you RHEL is and will continue to be legacy and will continue to dwindle into obsolescence. You mentioned the cool stuff Fedora is doing, that is not RHEL. CoreOS is the future.
      - esseph 2y ago
        RedHat developers are the ones making Fedora. Fedora is the upstream for RHEL. You are going to see RHEL transition to bootc: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/ Get with the times, fellow gray beard: https://github.com/redhat-cop/redhat-image-mode-demo https://github.com/redhat-cop/redhat-image-mode-demo --- * What is RHEL Image Mode? RHEL Image mode is a new approach for operating system deployment that enables users to create, deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image. This approach simplifies operations across the enterprise, allowing developers, operations teams and solution providers to use the same container-native tools and techniques to manage everything from applications to the underlying OS. * How is RHEL Image Mode different? Due to the container-oriented nature, RHEL Image mode opens up to a unification and standardization of OS management and deployment, allowing the integration with existing CI/CD workflows and/or GitOps, reducing complexity. RHEL Image mode also helps increasing security as the content, updates and patches are predictable and atomic, preventing manual modification of core services, packages and applications for a guaranteed consistency at scale. ---
pea 2y ago
Isn’t MQ pretty good?
- cyberpunk 2y ago
  It’s heavy and old. We have to consume some but Kafka is nicer to work with typically (provided someone else is running it)
  - ahoka 2y ago
    If Kafka is nicer to work with, then it must be horrible.
osigurdson 2y ago
Podman is pretty good.
nayuki 2y ago
> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it During my time at IBM and at other companies a decade ago, I can name examples of this: * Lotus Notes instead of Microsoft Office. * Lotus Sametime Connect instead of... well Microsoft's instant messengers suck (MSN, Lync, Skype, Teams)... maybe Slack is one of the few tolerable ones? * Rational Team Concert instead of Git or even Subversion. * Rational ClearCase instead of Git ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advantages-disadvantages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advant... ). * Using a green-screen terminal emulator on a Windows PC to connect to a mainframe to fill out weekly timesheets for payroll, instead of a web app or something. I'll concede that I like the Eclipse IDE a lot for Java, which was originally developed at IBM. I don't think the IDE is good for other programming languages or non-programming things like team communication and task management.
- zifpanachr23 2y ago
  The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm familiar with, I can often work much more quickly in a terminal than I can with a GUI. The assumption that this is different for non-programmers or that they are all scared of TUIs is often a mistaken assumption. The green screens also tend to have fantastic tab navigation and other keyboard navigation functionality that I almost never see in web apps (I'm not sure why as I'm not a front end developer, but maybe somebody else could explain that). I'll defend green screens all day long. Lots of people like them and I like them. Everything else you listed I would agree with you about being terrible and mostly hated though.
  - ksenzee 2y ago
    These days most web apps aren’t written to take advantage of the browser’s built-in tab navigation, and unless the dev is a keyboard user, they don’t even think to add it. This is largely the fault of React reinventing everything browsers already have built in, and treating accessibility as an afterthought. Bare metal web apps written in straight-up HTML do have decent tab navigation. They’re still not as snappy as a green terminal app, though. My first summer temp jobs during college were data entry, in the era when you might get a terminal app or a web app, and the old apps invariably had better UX.
tensor 2y ago
Why leave terraform? You don’t feel OpenTofu will carry the torch well enough?
exac 2y ago
I think this is an interesting graph comparing web searches for "terraform alternative" and "opentofu". Notice the spike when the IBM rumors began, and the current spike now that the acquisition is complete? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terraform%20alternative,%2Fg%2F11vd_6mpm5&hl=en-GB https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terrafor...
- justinclift 2y ago
  Both of those are still a rounding error compared to searches for Terraform though: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terraform%20alternative,%2Fg%2F11vd_6mpm5,terraform&hl=en-GB https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terrafor... That being said, it'll be interesting to see if it's still a rounding error 2 years from now.
worik 2y ago
> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it Not a product, but a service: is Red Hat Linux a counter example?
tiberious726 2y ago
Everyone I know who works with IBM i (used to be system i, as/400 before that) absolutely adores it. Gods do they every nickel and dime you tho.
hyperliner 2y ago
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throwaway2037 2y ago

How is Red Hat going after the acquisition by IBM? From my view, it is going well. The enterprise product (RHEL) is still excellent.

dralley 2y ago
It's going basically fine. If you're in engineering you would never notice the difference.
- sverhagen 2y ago
  Companies are often brought in and told that nothing will change, and as long as they can pull their weight, this may be true. IBM seems a pretty diversified company, and there RedHat doing 5% of the total revenue may not be too bad. I don't know how well RedHat is doing commercially, but a few bad quarters could draw negative attention of the sort where upper-management wants to start messing with you, seek more synergy, efficiency, alignment. Being a much smaller small company within Verizon, having been left alone for a little while, we were then told that The Hug was coming. It did. We didn't grow to be their next billion dollar business unit (as no surprise to anyone in our little company), nor were we able to complement other products (ha! synergy!) and we were shuttered. At some point... engineering will notice.
adastra22 2y ago
Dropping CentOS was a terrible decision. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the acquisition though.
- bonzini 2y ago
  It mostly happened afterwards but it was not driven by IBM.
- SEJeff 2y ago
  Centos stream still exists and it is in fact the actual upstream of rhel.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    But for all practical purposes, that is dropping CentOS. They completely changed the identity of the product, so the fact it has the same branding isn't going to placate anyone.
    - carlwgeorge 2y ago
      People that actually care about the distro being sustainable are quite happy with the changes. Sorry you don't get it.
  - vrighter 2y ago
    so? That just means that it is not necessarily compatible with the current version of rhel deployed on our servers
    - carlwgeorge 2y ago
      It's the same major version, so it's extremely compatible. Plus if you run into something that doesn't work the same, you just discovered what's going to break for your workload on your RHEL system when the next minor version is released.
      - 2y ago
iwontberude 2y ago
RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.
- cmdlinecowboy 2y ago
  RHEL 10 beta has some interesting stuff in it. Running the OS itself as a container caught my eye.
- dralley 2y ago
  Image mode RHEL is a pretty significant investment. Apart from that, in terms of keeping RHEL relevant, most of the attention is on making it easier to operate fleets at scale rather than the OS itself. Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, services in general, etc. Those are the key things that would keep it competitive against Ubuntu, Debian, Alma, Oracle etc.
- esseph 2y ago
  This is clearly someone that is not paying attention to what Red Hat is doing. RHEL is the enterprise gold standard. Fedora is a lot of the pipeline for it, which itself has become an incredible server and desktop platform. All the work with Open shift, backstage, podman / qubelet, etc. They're going to be fine, from my graybeard position.
  - iwontberude 2y ago
    Yes also a gray beard and been around long enough to tell you RHEL is and will continue to be legacy and will continue to dwindle into obsolescence. You mentioned the cool stuff Fedora is doing, that is not RHEL. CoreOS is the future.
    - esseph 2y ago
      RedHat developers are the ones making Fedora. Fedora is the upstream for RHEL. You are going to see RHEL transition to bootc: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/ https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/ Get with the times, fellow gray beard: https://github.com/redhat-cop/redhat-image-mode-demo https://github.com/redhat-cop/redhat-image-mode-demo --- * What is RHEL Image Mode? RHEL Image mode is a new approach for operating system deployment that enables users to create, deploy and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bootc container image. This approach simplifies operations across the enterprise, allowing developers, operations teams and solution providers to use the same container-native tools and techniques to manage everything from applications to the underlying OS. * How is RHEL Image Mode different? Due to the container-oriented nature, RHEL Image mode opens up to a unification and standardization of OS management and deployment, allowing the integration with existing CI/CD workflows and/or GitOps, reducing complexity. RHEL Image mode also helps increasing security as the content, updates and patches are predictable and atomic, preventing manual modification of core services, packages and applications for a guaranteed consistency at scale. ---

pea 2y ago

Isn’t MQ pretty good?

cyberpunk 2y ago
It’s heavy and old. We have to consume some but Kafka is nicer to work with typically (provided someone else is running it)
- ahoka 2y ago
  If Kafka is nicer to work with, then it must be horrible.

osigurdson 2y ago

Podman is pretty good.

nayuki 2y ago

> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it During my time at IBM and at other companies a decade ago, I can name examples of this: * Lotus Notes instead of Microsoft Office. * Lotus Sametime Connect instead of... well Microsoft's instant messengers suck (MSN, Lync, Skype, Teams)... maybe Slack is one of the few tolerable ones? * Rational Team Concert instead of Git or even Subversion. * Rational ClearCase instead of Git ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advantages-disadvantages https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advant... ). * Using a green-screen terminal emulator on a Windows PC to connect to a mainframe to fill out weekly timesheets for payroll, instead of a web app or something. I'll concede that I like the Eclipse IDE a lot for Java, which was originally developed at IBM. I don't think the IDE is good for other programming languages or non-programming things like team communication and task management.

zifpanachr23 2y ago
The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm familiar with, I can often work much more quickly in a terminal than I can with a GUI. The assumption that this is different for non-programmers or that they are all scared of TUIs is often a mistaken assumption. The green screens also tend to have fantastic tab navigation and other keyboard navigation functionality that I almost never see in web apps (I'm not sure why as I'm not a front end developer, but maybe somebody else could explain that). I'll defend green screens all day long. Lots of people like them and I like them. Everything else you listed I would agree with you about being terrible and mostly hated though.
- ksenzee 2y ago
  These days most web apps aren’t written to take advantage of the browser’s built-in tab navigation, and unless the dev is a keyboard user, they don’t even think to add it. This is largely the fault of React reinventing everything browsers already have built in, and treating accessibility as an afterthought. Bare metal web apps written in straight-up HTML do have decent tab navigation. They’re still not as snappy as a green terminal app, though. My first summer temp jobs during college were data entry, in the era when you might get a terminal app or a web app, and the old apps invariably had better UX.

tensor 2y ago

Why leave terraform? You don’t feel OpenTofu will carry the torch well enough?

exac 2y ago

I think this is an interesting graph comparing web searches for "terraform alternative" and "opentofu". Notice the spike when the IBM rumors began, and the current spike now that the acquisition is complete? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terraform%20alternative,%2Fg%2F11vd_6mpm5&hl=en-GB https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terrafor...

justinclift 2y ago
Both of those are still a rounding error compared to searches for Terraform though: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terraform%20alternative,%2Fg%2F11vd_6mpm5,terraform&hl=en-GB https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=terrafor... That being said, it'll be interesting to see if it's still a rounding error 2 years from now.

worik 2y ago

> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it Not a product, but a service: is Red Hat Linux a counter example?

tiberious726 2y ago

Everyone I know who works with IBM i (used to be system i, as/400 before that) absolutely adores it. Gods do they every nickel and dime you tho.

hyperliner 2y ago

[dead]