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I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

jeffgeerling.com

101–110 of 410 posts

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#101
post #7

I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

The point is that this is a stupid decision. It will turn people off Red Hat, and at the same time it’s incredibly annoying and inconvenient for a large number of Rocky/Alma/etc users.

> It will turn people off Red Hat

Will it turn paying customers off Red Hat? (Honest question)

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#103

The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452101

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#104

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would wa…

Fedora has been one of the most stable distributions I've ever used (I used it as my main system for ~6 years, but moved to another distribution now for unrelated reasons). It's also mostly developed by the community — Red Hat provides the infrastructure, but not much actual development.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#106
post #94

I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open sour…

> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion. Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article: >> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own offic…

There have been two instances I have seen where the word 'freeloader' was used by someone internally at Red Hat.

And there are a number of examples in public comments (one recently in the Fedora mailing list[1]) where you can easily substitute the phrase 'freeloader' for a longer description of the downstream communities. The same sentiment comes across either way.

[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#107

I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open sour…

This article is almost identical to the YouTube video just released, which I think partially explains the tone / style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#108

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would wa…

Fedoras big strength is the update speed.

The problem with distros is that you're always picking an update cycle tradeoff. Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time (RHEL also does this but is well, commercially backed while Debian is entirely volunteer driven, which has opened up Debian to maintainer shenanigans a couple of times).

Ubuntu is more up-to-date by virtue of simply importing the Debian backports repo every 9 months.

Arch Linux meanwhile runs on "whatever the latest upstream is", and with that you have pretty much 90% of the actively used Linux distros covered.

All of these models are untenable for someone who likes to stay up-to-date with the latest version but doesn't want to drop down into the occasional shell hell that Arch provides.

Fedora kinda... sits in the middle of that. It updates to latest version every 6 months, has a generally sane-ish release cycle that follows the most popular scripting language (Fedoras cycle is specifically staggered to allow for python releases to coincide with it every other release). That in turn makes it the best OS to recommend for Desktop Linux if you're new to Linux.

As for why not Arch/Debian/Ubuntu for beginners: Arch requires wanting to maintain the OS for the sporadic breakdown or strange default setting (not to mention the shell being an expected skill beyond running package management commands), Debian is too out-of-date to be useful and Ubuntu is only slightly better than Debian.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?

[flagged]

I'm actually from one of the countries they are moving jobs to, it's very US-centric to see racism whenever someone uses any geographic location that's not the "rich West".

Red Hat had some pretty sizeable layoffs recently and a bulk of their recruiting efforts are in the countries with cheaper labour.

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