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> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said, According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat. I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.
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…
RHEL compat per se is irrelevant, it's the 10 years guaranteed maintenance enterprise customers are after, plus a path forward for their third-party software investments only certified on RHEL (because of said guarantees) and internal IT deployment/admin line processes. Despite making the rounds on HN, enterprise and other commercial users give a flying fuck to io_uring, systemd (up until RHEL 7 when they were forced to), namespaces, and other Linux "innovations" which in fact are just annoyances to justify contracts for 30+ years of ongoing maintenance of an age-old POSIX core operating system once developed in a couple of months and praised for its minimalism.
Clever idea. They will gradually lure users their way.
Lol no. This is a wholly disingeneous move. "[SuSe] ... announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions." How will they confirm that their fork is compatible? Probably using RedHat supplied UBI docker/container images. So they're just becoming another add-no-value clone. Wow, give whoever came…
The only thing they need to ensure right now is that their stable release remains compatible to existing RHEL. Everything needed for that is around.
Going forward, maybe "RHEL v+1 compatible" doesn't even matter anymore (to quote that press release: "CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard.") RHEL became the defacto "Enterprise Linux" because everybody willingly handed them the control over the direction Enterprise Linux takes (including, but not limited to, by merely repackaging their work).
As long as that new community system (Rocky intends to work with SUSE according to that article) remains RHEL9.2 compatible, they might be able to force IBM to adopt the community's idea of an Enterprise Linux for future RHEL releases. Keeping some "RHEL9.2 mode" around indefinitely (next to a further developed platform for contemporary workloads) is relatively simple with containers and the like.
IBM might have just killed the one thing that kept RedHat dominant in that space: the goodwill of nearly everybody else to let RedHat lead and not rock the boat too much themselves.
Clever idea. They will gradually lure users their way.
Lol no. This is a wholly disingeneous move. "[SuSe] ... announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions." How will they confirm that their fork is compatible? Probably using RedHat supplied UBI docker/container images. So they're just becoming another add-no-value clone. Wow, give whoever came…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To be honest it's a pretty good track record if you can only remember one instance of botching a backport, it's many years old, and it didn't have any security impact unlike Debian's ssh key generation.
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 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra Just because Redhat handles this poorly (like pretty much everything), does not make the model bad. For example, almost every single security update on Debian, is backported when not handled by upstream. And there is a lot of that. You lose so much stability, if you track all-new. In fact, you literally spend more time chasing underlying bugs, instead your bugs, and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. Fuck it, let's make a cpu-free distribution whilst we're at it.
So sick of CPUs in Linux distros, the feature creep is insane!
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol no. This is a wholly disingeneous move. "[SuSe] ... announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions." How will they confirm that their fork is compatible? Probably using RedHat supplied UBI docker/container images. So they're just becoming another add-no-value clone. Wow, give whoever came…
> How will they confirm that they're fork is compatible? The only thing they need to ensure right now is that their stable release remains compatible to existing RHEL. Everything needed for that is around. Going forward, maybe "RHEL v+1 compatible" doesn't even matter anymore (to quote that press release: "CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard.") RHEL became the defac…
RedHat should take this opportunity to pivot and do something else. Holding on to licensing is dying especially in the world of clones.
1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution. 2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.