I’ve come across Red Hat allot lately and am wondering if I need to get studying. I’m an avid Ubuntu server user but don’t want to get stuck only knowing one distro. What is the way to go if i want to know as much as I can for use in real world situations.
Company I’m at runs Windows server. Kill me.
Oh dear god
I work at NASA and we use redhat a lot for development work.
ime: red hat & centos dominate with ubuntu, debian, suse and amazon linux all a distant 2nd.
i also expect it to change given red hat’s recent decision to stop sharing their source.
A lot of my clients were using CentOS. Not sure what’ll happen next now that Red Hat killed CentOD.
I’ve seen some organisations move from CentOS to Rocky Linux.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Well, maybe not Redhat these days…
Debian.
i dont get why people do not just use debian. especially if they got their own it person / support
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
Debian consultancy never near RHEL, that’s why they need to work hard on that, and make industry standard.
Red Hat drive the industry standard for more than 20 years… That make every Corp lean to it, and it won’t dwindling soon… Unless other are making Debian standardized.
Ubuntu tried it, still not even taking chunk I guess? Mostly Enterprise is RHEL/Clones.
No certification and no support. Critical bug will be fixed faster in RHEL than Debian when come to Enterprise, very clear structure and powerful consultancy.
that is just corp talk for “it is not my problem”
I dont know ubuntu server, which i mostly use because of livepatch, with unattended upgrades seem to fare better than the rhel deploys that i have done - and the customer never updated. Granted the last is not enterprise but Uni bioinfo servers but still.
Nah, it’s not fully about corp talk. I also have some University use RHEL, well, I would argue, in university, some do use ubuntu because it easiness to install and maintain, welp… But selinux vs apparmor… better use selinux in EL than in Ubuntu… haha… *most junior sysadmin fvk tup in Ubuntu when set it up… so In the end they just use… Well, EL Clones :/
But for research, I do agree, for NLP/ML, mostly I don’t see any EL Clones deployed in labs, most Prof use Ubuntu and Nvidia drivers… Scientific linux is well known then centOS stream, just they still don’t budge to move… this is hard to crack question, I never know why no EL, but I guess because ubuntu nvidia prefered driver done its best, better than CentOS/Fedora
Personal take: RHEL is a very high quality well integrated OS. Debian is a mess of community opinion all conflicting held together by outdated and poor tooling.
i find both rhel and debian tooling very outdated to be honest.
To tag onto this, what makes RHEL so special? Is it just the support you get from Red Hat or is there something about the distro that makes it so widely used?
Beyond support agreements that others are mentioning, the huge requirement for the shop I work at (mid-scale high performance computing center) it’s 3rd party vendor package support. Mellanox/nvidia, whamcloud, slurm, vast, and on and on. Driver packages targeting rhel kernels are an industry standard offering if a vendor supports linux. That’s not always the case with Debian variants, for instance.
Same with huge applications and proprietary compiler suites (think matlab and the intel compiler suite or OneAPI). These are hugely important packages for a number of shops.
Don’t get me wrong, I can build against plenty of other distros but my vendors target rhel as a first class citizen for both build scripts and straight binary packaging.
It is 100% the support. Corporations pay big money to have experts on call to fix things fast when they break, and there’s basically no other player for that kind of model in the Linux space.
Support contracts for risk mitigation is a big part of it, and the other is RH release engineering is amazing.
Aside from that, RHEL, and clones, is a very straight forward, clean distro. It’s very focused with everything doted and tidy, and overall, it has a very uncomplicated feel to it. In contrast Debian derivatives are kind of messy, and SUSE tries to stuff every function into a single application.
RHEL does push a lot of technology. Out of the stable distros, it will be the first to put tech into production. RH does a lot with integration with other systems. This has kept me off of SUSE in the past. RHEL was more tech forward, comparatively.
dnf downgrade
dnf history undo
dnf history redo
it’s very very very critical for most case :')
you can just snapshot before any transaction in apt / pacman / whatever else.
It’s hard, and better have package manager built in. It’s not enough in the enterprise sadly… Just saying, and I think most Corporate with agree with it.
the package manager will have it built in with a simple hook. works great with unattended upgrades.
Started with RHEL years ago, migrated to CentOS to get away from the license fees etc. Have since moved to Amazon Linux since we subsequently migrated everything to AWS.
I work at a big company: most of our customers are using RHEL when they use Linux. There are some customers that use SUSE for SAP workloads, but these are about 10% of all linux VMs.
I’ve been seeing a lot of alpine based containers recently. Used to see a lot of Ubuntu, debian, redhat.
I think a lot of it depends on if you are spinning a lot of containers up.
Ive worked a couple fortune 500s that used ubuntu. If im using aws ill stick with their distro but most of time im happy with ubuntu. I think distro choice matters less and less. Most of the systems ive run recently have had ansible to configure them or have just run docker containers. Most of the gov contracts iveworked on insisted on red hat but honestly the teams making those decsions seemed the least technically capeable ive worked with and it was just a red tape issue to change distros
I think in fortune 500, it’s only fraction that use ubuntu/Debian, as most of marketshare hold by red hat, 95% as I remember last time. Than 3% of windows, less than that is everything else.
All of my personal servers are Debian. My last company switched their entire production fleet from centos to Debian. I think a lot of people switched to Debian back when the Centos Stream debacle went down.
I work for a big enterprise, we have RHEL on all our Linux servers save for a few that are SuSe for SAP.
I was working as a DWDM technician sometime ago and IIRC most of DWDM hardware (or at least the Infinera ones, as I had used those the most) were actually running on Gentoo, which was kinda surprising for me.
But in “regular” environments I have mainly seen Ubuntu or Debian.
