271–280 of 307 posts
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My feeling is that most engineers outside of Germany prefer RHEL to SLES.
My feeling is most engineers prefer Debian. It's managers that tend to prefer corporate solutions.
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…
I wrote this a few months ago explaining why Red Hat makes money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588297 (Still amazed that no one understands these basic points)
Its almost as bad as people believing that Walmart, Target, etc are closing their stores because of "so much theft" as if shrink budgets weren't a thing. Having a loss prevention department is a misnomer, its a paperwork and accounting department so that the losses can be written off to the IRS. These places have KPI's for everything and probably know the locations where they have a store but a majority of people are ordering online. I'm sure their lease has some notion of financial hardship which "theft" falls into allowing them to exit the contract early.
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Some software vendors - e.g. major engineering applications - only support their products on RHEL.
Right, but I think the OP's question is why are you using RHEL compat instead of just getting licensed RHEL. In your example a company is already fine with paying full price for major engineering applications why wouldn't you do the same for your underlying OS.
But yielding that point would mean that RH/IBM would have you over a barrel on pricing. Probably why Suse is forcing the issue.
P.S. and Oracle is piling on ...
Did SUSE coordinate this announcement With Oracle? Because they also announced similar thing yesterday https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-ope...
Is it me or there was a certain passive-agressivenes on that Oracle article?
"Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden."
I can't understand how IBM & Red Hat can see this article and the statements from Oracle and not think. "Are we the bad guys?"
Anybody on the same side as Oracle should be asking really hard questions.
I suspect that RedHat's moves were specifically aimed straight at Oracle with AWS a distant second.
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> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro. Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream. On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats mov…
I've started to see 2023 as the Year of Freeloader Ousting, it seems to be an overarching trend between all the things going on in tech currently.
I'm ... oddly actually not opposed.
Things being "free" has distorted a lot of markets and ossified them--even in open source (See: GitHub, for example).
If things actually cost something, people can get paid to do them. In addition, things that cost real money don't have the same pressure to go for giant network effects in the hopes to get a lock-in monopoly. It also sidesteps the advertising pathologies.
I don't see any of these things as bad.
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An interesting thing about Oracle Linux... $ ssh me@myol7.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release Oracle Linux Server release 7.9 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 7.9 (Maipo) $ ssh me@myol8.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release Oracle Linux Server release 8.8 Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.8 (Ootpa) $ ssh me@myol9.myplace.com cat /etc/oracle-release /etc/redhat-release Ora…
My understanding is /etc/redhat-release needs to be there because some (dumb) blob drivers specifically check that file to see if you're running a compatible RHEL system before it'll even attempt to install.
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> it is obviously more sustainable to upgrade versions every N years I've heard this kind of thing before, but it's worth considering that utility, government, and infrastructure software may be under different kinds of constraints than what you're used to. Testing field upgrades takes years and the rollout often takes a year or more. There are hundreds of different teams involved and every one of them wants to ensur…
> worth considering that utility, government, and infrastructure software may be under different kinds of constraints than what you're used to. I worked on a government project where new software was being built on COBOL because they had those devs available. No commercial company in their right mind would build any new applications in COBOL, but government is a different animal.
But given the number of COBOL platforms available that have dwindling numbers of maintainers, someone with that skillset can demand a very decent chunk now, I'm told.
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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…
From what I've seen big enterprises have thousands of RHEL or SLES licenses and the whole thing is managed by one guy who can hardly migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 because of the huge backlog of work he has. For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years
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My feeling is that most engineers outside of Germany prefer RHEL to SLES.
So as a daily desktop user, how different are they in a professional environment?