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I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

jeffgeerling.com

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

#231

Post by solamarpreet »

neverartful wrote: post #160
kelnos wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter if they've contributed or not. They still need to abide by the terms of the license.

In what way is Red Hat not abiding by the license? My understanding is that Red Hat is making the source code available to their users via their customer portal. I don't think that they have an obligation to make their source code available to non-users.

They have an obligation under the GPL to allow end users to redistribute. Terminating the subscriber agreement for redistribution is punishing the user for exercising his right granted to him by the GPL.

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

#233

Post by geerlingguy »

jzb wrote: post #219
freedomben wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with most of what you said, but: > If that angers you, I heartily encourage folks to build Debian up as the standard we all certify against. Or start your own business that overtakes Red Hat and earns the place RHEL has today. This strikes me as a variation of the "if you don't like Apple or Google's rules, make your own phone" or "if you don't like Youtube's content policies, then start your own video compan…

It's also, as has been demonstrated, wildly impractical for Red Hat to continue exactly as before without others undermining its business. The thing is that everybody is only lobbying Red Hat to make concessions, but nobody's going after Oracle or Rocky or Alma or other clones to say "hey, cool it. Red Hat's trying to keep a business going here. You're undermining their business. If you keep this up, they're going to…

They could also shrink down to a more manageable business unit... except IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, and you can't ever decrease revenues or the axe drops :(

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

#234

Post by Arnavion »

hospitalJail wrote: post #22
mynameisvlad wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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'

The parentheses means they're done with RHEL the OS and RH the company as a whole.

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

#235

Post by tomohawk »

Our team has seen 2 breaking changes in the past month from RH that caused problems in production. One in RHEL7 and one in RHEL8. It's definitely making us question the wisdom of the RHEL LTS approach. The LTS part is not what we're seeing.

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

#236

Post by yrro »

kazinator wrote: post #208

What is the actual issue here? It's not explained well. Is that the CentOS Stream is not a bona fide community distro, but simply a sneaky name for something that is actually "RHEL Beta"? The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition. Which makes it a dickhead move for it to be using the name. Technically, i…

> What is the actual issue here?

RHEL source code may now only be obtained via the Red Hat customer portal rather than pulled from Git.

This means that RHEL rebuilds (which _want_ to be downstream of RHEL) now have no way to obtain sources, since in order to use the customer portal you have to agree to not distribute the content downloaded from it to anyone else.

> The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition.

There's no paywall in front of CentOS Stream. Anyone can download it for free like any other Linux distro.

> Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot.

CentOS Stream _is_ upstream of RHEL. It's far more of a community OS than CentOS ever was. Paywalls and subscriptions are for RHEL not CentOS Stream.

The problem is that the traditional CentOS community does not _want_ to be upstream of RHEL. But they also don't want to pay for it...

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

#237

Post by iscream26 »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #195
noirscape wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Just a quick note: debian stable has a new release every two years. So in the very worst case "decades" means like three years. The horror, the humanity, just remembering how software used to be three whole years ago causes me to shudder.

> just remembering how software used to be three whole years ago causes me to shudder

Well, yes. I agree with that statement even though you made it facetiously. Backporting security fixes only for bugs that have made enough noise to warrant it is a horribly janky hack. And, just thinking about all the time that has been, in my opinion, wasted on custom code that Debian maintainers have had to write in order to backport fixes makes me shudder.

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

#238

Post by olddustytrail »

ynx wrote: post #229

> Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own. I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux's continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat does di…

No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat.

Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.

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

#239

Post by dylan604 »

freedomben wrote: post #89

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…

Geerling is very good at getting his content to the top of lists. I had the same sentiments you have at the second post on this issue with Redhat. Occasionally, he'll post something that piques my interest, but most of the time his YT style "marketing" is just too over the top. I know he's doing it specifically to get those metrics, and I hope it works for him and the audience it gathers is what he's looking for. Since he doesn't change, I assume it is. I'm sure he sleeps at night just fine

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

#240

Post by kkielhofner »

noirscape wrote: post #108
kkielhofner wrote: post #85

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 i…

This middle ground of sorts is what I was alluding to with "a few specific scenarios". From what I recall Fedora is the distro of choice for Linus? So it's clearly not completely terrible and I never said it was. That said, the creator of Linux is about as far as you can get from a typical/average user...

Per usual HN there are plenty of conflicting anecdotal reports and wildly differing perspectives on my position here and as I noted in another reply I absolutely could not care any less when it comes to people selecting the best tool for their purposes/opinion/experience/worldview. Not being steeped in modern Red Hat (I have an RHCE cert for RedHat 8 around here somewhere) but having decades of experience across many other distros the difference in experience as a "new user" with Fedora was striking. Also note that "new user" isn't exactly accurate here either - the install process was great, the UI is clean, etc. However, as soon as I got off the beaten path the quality of experience (again, for me personally) dropped to among the poorest I've seen in years with Linux distros.

Back to another anecdote for me, after decades I can count on one hand the number of times I thought "wow I could really stand to have a newer system python release" (as one example) - even when using pretty long in the tooth Ubuntu 20.04.

I'm not saying that doesn't happen and doesn't have it's advantages. It's a good point generally but I'm as confused as I am because it's never been even remotely close to a deal-breaker in my decades of doing all kinds of random stuff (from embedded to desktop to server to cloud). I don't know what people are doing to call them "too out-of-date to be useful" but again that's just me - I'm sure you and others have plenty of reasons for this position. I've just never encountered anything close to it.

Python specifically has such famous and nightmarish packaging and dependency issues I more times than not just throw everything into whatever official release Docker container for the version I need and call it a day. Great? No. Hacky? Yes. Practical? Absolutely.

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