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.
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?
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.
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.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Well, maybe not Redhat these days…
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.
Where I’m at, that would be Ubuntu, followed by Debian.
Debian.
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’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.
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.
i dont get why people do not just use debian. especially if they got their own it person / support
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 Debian is a mess of community opinion all conflicting held together by outdated and poor tooling.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.
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.
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
The default Linux image on AWS (Amazon Linux) is RPM-based; but the default image on Google Cloud currently appears to be Debian “bullseye” (the April 2023 release) with an option for “bookworm” (brand new this month). I’m not sure about Microsoft Azure but their docs suggest a Debian default as well.
So that’s one impression. Knowing both
dpkg/aptandrpmwill serve you well.Major tech companies have their own internal distributions in their production datacenters, which focus much more on their specific needs. Any major tech company using Linux in datacenters will have an engineering team specifically building what they need.
That’s interesting to know thanks! I do know some dpkg and apt but nothing about rpm so will learn more about that.
Company I’m at runs Windows server. Kill me.
Oh dear god
I work for a well known internet company, and its 98% redhat (or derivative) with some alpine and ubuntu scattered about randomly
100% sure its Debian.
Mission critical server mostly are RHEL or EL Clone or Fedora or it’s derivative… If you combine even Azure nowdays, Microsoft Linux is derived from Fedora, same as Amazon Linux, and others… Debian are covering some part, but mostly hobbyist, or SME, and mostly non critical, as they don’t have standard across, even on their https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended and https://www.debian.org/consultants/
apt also bad when you got to dowgrade package when something mess up, and get messy with dpkg… :'(
So I quite doubt if it’s production env, mostly go with EL. I do know some company use Ubuntu/Debian, but it’s quite few…
If Ubuntu/Debian want to shape Industries, and kick out RHEL, they need to have standard, and better consultancy than RHEL. I hope so that they could grow and make market competitive, but for now it isn’t sadly.
Debian needs to focus more on automation if they want more penetration in the enterprise. Debian feels made for human admins logging in and managing things old school style which is fine for a few machines. Modern enterprises use Ansible etc and need highly functional non-interactive ways to install and configure etc. Preseed and Apt leave something to be desired here.
What has automation to do with a distro? You can automate any distro. Ansible runs on any linux.
A distro can make automation more difficult than it needs to be. As I mentioned in my examples, Preseed sucks, have you ever used it? And of course Ansible works on pretty much any distro, but Debian family distros are made with the expectation of user input, such as expecting configuration values during package installation and this has to be worked around. It’s not impossible, just more work and testing. When you’re automating CentOS and Ubuntu next to each other, you’ll realize extra Ubuntu related code.
Not a big deal, it’s just minor preferences.
but Debian family distros are made with the expectation of user input, such as expecting configuration values during package installation
Any examples? I never installed such a package.
It’s been a long time, if I remember correctly one of them is Postfix. Again going from memory that’s at least five years old, when installed in say Ubuntu, you get asked questions, like what you want your mailserver hostname to be, whether you want to configure a relay, etc. This is fine if you know the answers at install time and you’re around to answer the question, otherwise your automation will hang indefinitely if this is not worked around.
Now also IIRC, there are ways to work around this, such as by providing the answers in your automation for the package install step (but then you’re mixing partial postfix config with the package install and the remainder of the config is separate, feels weird) , in some cases it’ might be simply an apt option, but like I said, it takes extra code in your automation which is not necessary on RHEL based distros. Installing a package in Ansible can be 3 short lines of code, for Deb based it’s like 10 lines.
Doing this for one package isn’t such a big deal, but when you find yourself having to work around things and writing extra code for one specific distro/family it becomes clear it wasn’t made for automation and unless you have a personal affinity for it, it’s just a bit easier to use something else.
This is not a diss, it’s not a bad thing for a distro to made for humans, it’s just in that the environments I work in, managing hundreds of machines with Ansible and having a significant code base I prefer to have my code smaller and cleaner.
