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SUSE is forking RHEL

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Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#151

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

tw04 wrote: post #143
bonzini wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're admitting that the Linux that enterprise people want is RHEL (or RHEL-based) and not SLES. Also, if CIQ follows them and SUSE bases this on CentOS Stream (at least for RHEL9; CentOS Stream 8 is admittedly a bit messy), this is exactly what Red Hat was hoping to achieve.

The US market is primarily RHEL. Historically the EU market and SAP shops were SLES. I admit I’m far enough removed today that I’m not sure if that still holds true.

Enterprises don't care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider.

RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#153

Post by Spooky23 »

mst wrote: post #23
silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

The time (some years back now, it was a 5.10 patch and a 5.8 rpm) they mis-backported a perl patch to work around a bug in a deprecated CPAN module for one of their enterprise customers and in the process caused a 2x-30x slowdown of lots of other newer code (including the library that had replaced it in the majority of production environments by that point) was 'fun'. Took me a couple years to get together a coalitio…

That’s life.

I can’t count the number of times some rando Microsoft patch has boned a massive global infrastructure.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#154

Post by gigatexal »

em-bee wrote: post #145
gigatexal wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be. It very well could be that the whole RH model dies with the success of clones. I was more-or-less just spitballing. But what are they to do? I guess double down? And try to increase their value add but then if it comes from software quality or their QA/validation that goes into making RHEL the clones will get it for free too

i don't think the clones themselves are the problem, but the commercial support available for clones is taking away business from red hat, and that is where the conflict lies. in a way it is actually a similar problem with amazon and the like offering commercial support for databases. that is an inherent problem in the FOSS model. on one hand it is great that anyone can offer support for any FOSS software, but when b…

Same i've no clue how to solve FOSS funding

> "i don't think the clones themselves are the problem, but the commercial support available for clones is taking away business from red hat, and that is where the conflict lies."

exactly what i mean when I say 0-value-added-clones because they then turn around and sell support on the clones which seems seemingly unethical to me somehow -- though i am still working through that thought process.

I would not want to be RedHat here actually. It's a tough situation.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#155

Post by Luctct »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #93
freeone3000 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. Hey, here’s a comprehensive guide complete with commands, expected outcomes, and side effects of each command for setting up a Windows Domain using an RHEL domain controller: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_single... Oh, that’s for 7.5? One that’s 15 years old and no longer under standard support? It still works! Wait, but you’re a new custom…

I wish I could upvote this 10,000 times. Documentation isn't sexy or something. I don't know why Linux documentation sucks so much, but Redhat makes it suck must less. It takes lots of effort, money and writer hours to create the kind of documentation that Redhat maintains and businesses love documentation. A HOWTO or a FAQ are not documentation. I actually prefer man pages and I dropped Linux for my personal project…

Arch has excellent documentation. It definitely stands out.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#156

Post by sgarland »

znpy wrote: post #12
silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

[flagged]

Hell, even in my homelab I’ve moved past wanting new shiny. I just want NFS to play nicely and stop silently failing with nary a log message.

Playing around with distros and bleeding edge is fun until you just want the OS to get out of your way so you can do stuff. Then you regret your decisions.

I don’t run Arch, BTW. Debian.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#157

Post by rascul »

gtirloni wrote: post #87
pipo234 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason SUSE hasn't received a lot of attention even though they have been waving their flag long before the Red-Hat — CentOS brouhaha.

Back in the old RH Linux days, I remember SUSE had as much market share as Red Hat. It was actually the distro that people suggested I should use because it was more polished. But SUSE was bought and sold a few times to shady companies, wasn't it? My memory is blurry but this might explain why people don't immediately think of it.

SUSE lost a lot of love back in the day when Novell (then owner of SUSE) did some stuff with MS.

https://www.wired.com/2008/08/microsoft-novell-extend-contro...

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#158

Post by mishagale »

tw04 wrote: post #143
bonzini wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're admitting that the Linux that enterprise people want is RHEL (or RHEL-based) and not SLES. Also, if CIQ follows them and SUSE bases this on CentOS Stream (at least for RHEL9; CentOS Stream 8 is admittedly a bit messy), this is exactly what Red Hat was hoping to achieve.

The US market is primarily RHEL. Historically the EU market and SAP shops were SLES. I admit I’m far enough removed today that I’m not sure if that still holds true.

I remember that way back when, Deutschebank standardised on SuSE because they were a major shareholder in the company. DB had an IT department bigger than most entire companies, so I'm sure that had a pretty big effect on the ecosystem.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#159

Post by ilyt »

mst wrote: post #23
silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

The time (some years back now, it was a 5.10 patch and a 5.8 rpm) they mis-backported a perl patch to work around a bug in a deprecated CPAN module for one of their enterprise customers and in the process caused a 2x-30x slowdown of lots of other newer code (including the library that had replaced it in the majority of production environments by that point) was 'fun'. Took me a couple years to get together a coalitio…

I saw RedHat backport kernel bugs... we had one that bricked VLAN support on certain NIC that was put into Centos 5.

For those that do not know, RHEL kernels are a bit of an abomination with both bugfixes and new features backported, just so they can tell to customers that the kernel version is "stable" (which is a bit of clown fiesta as Linux doesn't break backward compat on kernel level anyway) and that was one of the things mis-backported and not even tested, just copied bug from upstream.

.... which half a year later got backported to Centos 6 too...

They also do nasty shit like re-enabling/backporting legacy ciphers to software (like OpenSSH) that removed them or disabled them in code base. So you go thru audit, there are points about not using this and that now-insecure ciphers, but you look and see "hey, this one was disabled by default in , we're fine", and discover that you're NOT fine because RHEL in their infinite wisdom enabled it by default because some old legacy customers needed it and couldn't be bothered to edit their own configs.

After near-two-decades I want to get off Mr. Red Hat weird ride. Just fucking use Debian

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#160

Post by ilyt »

generalizations wrote: post #85
pipo234 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to this from personal experience; we sell proprietary software that runs on multiple platforms. Our market is broadcasters, CDNs, telcos, media companies. We target Ubuntu and Alpine, but also ship CentOS/Rocky/RHEL/Oracle/Alma and Windows. Even though customers rarely ask for the latter targets, we need to offer those simply because we wouldn't be taken seriously if this major market segment were absent on ou…

I’m surprised (and happy) to hear that you target alpine. Is it really in use in those market segments?

Nope, but it's used as basis of Docker containers a lot
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