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What makes us Red Hat

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Re: What makes us Red Hat

#31

Post by kbenson »

brightball wrote: post #2

It's this mindset that makes me want to support Red Hat as a company. As good as the Fedora 25 experience has been for me, I'd love to see Linux laptop vendors (especially Dell) make it an installed option soon. Maybe CentOS laptops would make more sense for them from a sheer "stability for support sake" experience.

There's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there (or at least, there has been in the past. I've been out of the loop on this for a few years). CentOS/RHEL are definitely the stable, long-term distros, but they don't always map exactly to a specific Fedora release, so you can't necessarily just build RPMs for the last few Fedora versions and also support CentOS/RHEL. Historically, when looking for software that wasn't already in a repo but packages were provided, you would often see Ubuntu and Fedora packages but not RHEL (and thus CentOS) packages.

RHEL's release schedule is really optimized around server and workstation time scales, not desktop time scales. Ubuntu's is much more amenable to desktop use, where you get an LTS release every 24 months. RHEL regularly goes 3-4 years now (with point release refreshes, but that's not too exciting for desktop users). The flip side is that RHEL and CentOS have a much longer support lifecycle.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#32

Post by notalaser »

infodroid wrote: post #8
m348e912 wrote: post #4

Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because i…

Have you considered the possibility that your poor experience with Red Hat was due to the fact you were new to Linux? Encountering dependency hell is usually a sign that you don't know what you're doing. Red Hat "just works" and has always enjoyed the reputation of being the most bulletproof distro if you could afford it.

Back when Solaris 7 was a thing, dependency hell was very much a thing.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#34

Post by kbenson »

digitalshankar wrote: post #27

Red Hat or the Microsoft of Linux is the face palm of linux distros, forget dependency hell, how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system or distros like Ubuntu? People just buy it for the support even if the Red Hat they use is Gnome 2 and Firefox V.3.0. Then finally RHCA/RHCE courses, i should get certified from this distro to prove my Linux skills for the companies even though i…

> how on earth someone choose rpm over first class Superior Debian package system

So, what makes the Debian package system superior? Having built multiple specs in the past, but not any debs, I'm curious. Given that you can often convert debs to RPMs and vice-versa, and can use the different package managers on either type of repository, it's not obvious where one has any specific benefit.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#35

Post by yeukhon »

Panini_Jones wrote: post #21
yeukhon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aren't they also the only successful free software business in history? Are you sure you meant "open source software" not free software?

The software is free, is it not? Red Hat's business model is subscription based.

No, I am referring to Stallman's view on free software. See below. Software free to download vs "free software" from a license PoV aren't necessarily the same. Redhat's products are best to describe as open source software.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.en.html

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#37

Post by iamacynic »

davidw wrote: post #20
tekklloneer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of them. Many of them are smaller players consisting of core developers providing feature additions for money, or support contracts, or selling an "enterprise" wrapper/hosted. scala, mail servers come to mind quickly

It's really difficult from a business point of view. To have a business, you have to have something scarce to sell people - it could be simply your time, but that's difficult to scale. For most companies it's some kind of product, but open source products are inherently not scarce. So to succeed, you have to have a source of scarcity in there somewhere, and that's not always easy, on top of the fact that no startup i…

it's bad only if that's the company you want to take to $1 billion scale.

what if you don't have hot shot VC buddies from princeton, and didn't go to stanford, and need to make $1m in cash to do your real business idea? all of a sudden doing paid features for an open source project or doing consulting sounds like a fantastic idea because that will get you to $1m, almost guaranteed (if you're generally capable)

hint: that's pretty much everyone.

Re: What makes us Red Hat

#40

Post by knieveltech »

michel-slm wrote: post #10
m348e912 wrote: post #4

Red Hat was primary reason it took me a lot longer to adopt Linux than it should have. Headbanging experiences with dependency hell and things not working as expected left me extremely discouraged. It wasn't until I dabbled a little with Solaris 7 and finally found Slackware that I realized that Linux could "just work". IMO Red Hat's success was primarily based on the critical mass of support behind it, not because i…

Before yum and dnf, dependency hell is a serious issue indeed. After that it's still a problem if you use multilib (sometimes updates get pushed for x86_64 but the i686 packages are missing) but I wouldn't really call it a dependency hell anymore.

Seriously. Weekend long marathons of dependency chasing (in the snow, uphill both ways) to finally get config/make/make install to run were not only a thing but disturbingly commonplace. These kids don't know how good they've got it. God I feel old.
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