this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
35 points (85.7% liked)

Linux

48023 readers
970 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I see all the drama around Red-hat and I still don't get why companies would use RHEL (or centos when it existed). I was in many companies and CentOS being years behind was awful for any recent application (GPU acceleration, even new CPU had problems with old Linux kernels shipped in CentOS).

Long story short the only time one of the company I worked in considered CentOS it was ditched out due to many problems and not even being devs/researchers friendly.

I hear a lot of Youtube influencers "talking" (or reading the Red-Hat statements) about all the work Red-Hat is doing but I don't see any. I know I dislike gnome so I don't care they contribute to that.

What I see though is a philosophy against FOSS. They even did a Microsoft move with CentOS (Embrace, extend, and extinguish). I see corporate not liking sharing and collaborating together but aiming at feeding of technology built as a collective. I am convinced they would love to patent science discovery too. I am pretty sure there is a deep gap in philosophy between people wanting "business-grade" Linux and FOSS community.

If you have concrete examples of Red-Hat added value that cannot be fulfilled by independent experts or FOSS community, I'd really like to hear that.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The two major benefits of RedHat seem to be:

  • Dedicated support
  • Long term stable

Now LTS is provided by others but the support isn't always there. A lot of enterprises like the support as sort of an insurance if they lose their experts.

Personally I don't agree with enterprises that think that way, but it is the reason it has stuck around so long.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

You can add support contract requirements for some pieces of software coming from vendors with so little confidence in their product that they're rather have it run on an outdated dependencies environnement. A side effect of the logic you talked about, applied to software vendors.