This is a pretty timely statement of values and development ideology apropos Canonical's sudden pivot from fragmenting the Linux desktop community.
What are you referring to?
What makes us Red Hat
41–50 of 257 posts
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#42What is so great about RH? When i had opportunity to use it, it look so bad mostly because lack of current/decent software in repo. Maybe their support is amazing?
Yes, support and peace of mind. Packages that make it into their repository are fully tested and supported by RH. Almost all of them are old but they are pretty much guaranteed stable and Red Hat will support the software until the EOL of whichever RH version you are running, even if the developers of the package do not support a version of the package anymore.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#43Red 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…
I agree, but they've certainly come a long way. When I started with Red Hat 6.2, the dependency hell of installing RPMs from random websites and using the (almost never functional) up2date left me with an awful taste in my mouth as I jumped ship to Debian and the "just works" experience of apt-get. After switching to Fedora because we're using CentOS at work, I've come to like it. DNF and yum are fine replacements fo…
Debian and apt-get are the final Linux distribution / package manager I will ever use. Fifteen years of compiling dependency hell, never again.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Redhat's code is Free software, actually. The page you link simply says they don't follow the free software distribution guidelines (and thus are not endorsed by the FSF/GNU project) because they also allow non-free software in their repos.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#45Red 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.
Installing software on an OS, shouldn't be something that requires ANY experience. What exactly is the point of an OS without the software running on it? If it's not immediately obvious how to do any of it, for a total noob, to a veteran. Then it's a garbage OS in my opinion.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#46The Red Hat retail to Enterprise shift still leaves a little bitter taste in my mouth. I remember when they shut down public access to the rhel binaries and the beginnings of Centos. All legit to the letter of the license and no more.
I get it though. Anyone know how Centos under Red Hat is nowadays?
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
UNIX vendors didn't normally ship releases or updates that introduced dependency issues. Part of their job was doing testing and quality assurance, that's what you were paying good money for. Most such issues were introduced locally.
A good sysadmin would know how to avoid dependency hell. For example this might include taking basic precautions such as testing changes in a chroot or development/testing environment, before rolling them out.
I'm not saying the problem didn't exist, only that it wasn't an actual problem if you knew what you were doing.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#48What is so great about RH? When i had opportunity to use it, it look so bad mostly because lack of current/decent software in repo. Maybe their support is amazing?
Yes, support and peace of mind. Packages that make it into their repository are fully tested and supported by RH. Almost all of them are old but they are pretty much guaranteed stable and Red Hat will support the software until the EOL of whichever RH version you are running, even if the developers of the package do not support a version of the package anymore.
Sometimes being old is a double edged sword. For instance, RHEL7 has a lot of problems on AWS because the kernel is too old to properly support many of the virtualisation features AWS provides. On bare metal RHEL7 is great, though.
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#49Just started working at Red Hat about a month ago. Absolutely love working for this company! Especially that most engineers use GNU/Linux of some sort. Great to see this!
Re: What makes us Red Hat
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
Consulting is not a great business in a lot of ways, and 1 million is not at all easy unless you're 1) someplace where that's not a lot of money, or 2) you're famous.
I would heartily suggest avoiding it, as it's also not scalable even at a small size.
Look at the kind of stuff the 'micropreneur' guys do, like patio11's bingo thing. That was small (I agree with you there) but still something that once running, kept making money without a daily grind like consulting.