Comment by salmo
3 years ago
RedHat claims or at least claimed that for EL. I think it’s limited to within minor releases though, with majors being API.
That’s fine if you’re OK relying on their packages and 3rd party “enterprise” software that’s “certified” for the release. No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.
The most annoying to me was that RHEL6 was still under support and had an ancient kernel that excluded running Go, GRaalVM, etc. static binaries. No epoll() IIRC.
Often times you find yourself having to pull more and more libraries into a build. It all starts with wanting a current Python and before you know it you’re bringing in your own OpenSSL.
And they have no problem changing their system management software in patch releases. They’ve changed priority of config files too many times. But that’s another rant for another day.
This is a place where I wish some BSD won out. With all the chunks of the base userspace + kernel each moving in their own direction it’s impossible to get out of this place. Then add in every permutation of those pieces from the distros.
Multiple kernel versions * multiple libc implementations * multiple inits * …
I’d never try to make binary-only software for Linux. Dealing with packaging OSS is bad enough.
> No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.
glances nervously at my corporate-issued ThinkPad running RHEL 8
> No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.
I worked somewhere where we ran CentOS on the desktop. That seemed to work pretty well. I don't see why RHEL would be any worse, apart from being more expensive.
I ran CentOS on the desktop for many years. It was a very nice, solid setup that I could rely on updating without sweating about an upgrade breaking something. I've recently switched to fedora in light of recent CentOS 8 shenanigans but CentOS 7 was wonderful at the time.
What did centos 8 do?
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I ran RHEL (IIRC it was RHEL 6) on my desktop at Amazon from 2013 to 2015, as did all SDEs.
> No one in their right mind would run RHEL on a desktop.
Err.... yes we do? It's a development base I know isn't going to change for a long time, and I can always flatpak whatever applications I need. Hell, now that RHEL 9 includes pipewire I put it on my DAW/DJ laptop.