Looking Ahead To Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 News During Red Hat Summit 2019 Week

[You-]

GO likewise is searching for a reason to exist.

AFAIK, Red Hat has bet pretty big on Go recently. Podman/Buldah/Skopeo are in Go.

I have also read sugestions that the Toolbox (introduced to make containers easier on Silerblue, but turning into a nice and convenient interface) might be rewritten in Go.

[You-]

As always when it comes to Red Hat version number is more of a suggestion then the real information. Red Hat backports a lot of stuff to their versions of the software, so I wouldn't be surprised if GNOME in RHEL 8, in reality, resembles more 3.30 and soon 3.32 then 3.28 in terms of performance patches.

They have changed their process recently. For RHEL 7 AFAIK every even minor release included an update of the desktop environment.

[skeetre]

While this is all true the flip side is that many skip RHEL due to it being so far behind.

I don't think this is the case... most people that use RHEL don't have a choice. We're just now starting the migration to RHEL7, much less RHEL8 where I work. And we don't have a choice really, it's RHEL, or CentOS. Those are the only 2 options, and really only RHEL to have paid support, though I think in the past 15 years we've called RedHat once or twice, and got email support about the same. It'll probably be another 2-3 years before we migrate to RHEL8. We have folks asking us to ride out RHEL6 until it's EOL. Our developers are still porting their 32-bit software over to 64-bit. Most corporations and definitely Government entities are never on the bleeding edge of OS releases, unless that is their business.

[mroche]

They've been upgrading GNOME a lot more now (7.2/7.3 - 3.14; 7.4 - 3.22; 7.5 - 3.26; 7.6 - 3.28), so that'll likely continue to happen with RHEL 8. As for the gcc-go aspect, does anyone here actually know anyone using it over the official Go utilities? I don't. And with the revamped toolsets that came around in DTS 3.1/3.2 with the now available go-toolset-1.11, I don't see a reason why they would continue supporting it. The appstreams in RHEL 8 also provide these. I'm assuming the GA release of RHEL 8 will bring the versions up from where they were in the beta to match those in the RHEL 7 SCL repos.

I'm really looking forward to this release, though I will probably be sticking with RHEL 7 for some time as the applications I use get vetted for its use. Will also be using X for several more years, but that's do to NVIDIA hardware requirements unless the Wayland situation gets ironed out soon, both DE and application side.

skeetre
We are also looking to migrate off of RHEL 6 (public university HPC center) this summer, likely to RHEL 7.6. The need for support contracts is essentially required, and CentOS doesn't get auditing/security verifications that RHEL does to comply with government regulations. For people skipping RHEL for it being behind, sure, if they're an individual or really small team. Bigger groups are far less likely to care.

Cheers,
Mike

[SyXbiT]

I have a bunch of servers on RHEL 7. RHEL 7 is pretty old these days, so every now and then I'm tempted to move to something more up to date .
But I've encountered zero serious problems with RHEL. No update in recent memory has ever borked my systems. A lot of people value stability, security and predictability over shiny features. I suspect if I migrated my servers to something shinier, I'd regret it, and pay for it by having to fix stuff.

The reality is that for most people, the value of their server is the app sitting on top of the kernel. Not the kernel itself. I sometimes have problems with my apps. I don't also need to troubleshoot the OS.

[calc]

While this is all true the flip side is that many skip RHEL due to it being so far behind.

The people who skip RHEL/SLES/OEL and use eg Fedora in a business setting either have a huge talent pool to fix issues immediately as they crop or are soon to be unemployed when the first big problem pops up and the business loses tons of money due to downtime.

Based on your comment you might be surprised at how many companies hire non 'rockstar' sysadmins.

[phred14]

Wayland by default is perhaps the wrong choice with GNOME 3.28. It's definitely matured into a decent experience with 3.32 but everything previous doesn't hold up to an enterprise level experience.

Anyone know the state of XWayland in this release? The CAD software I run in an enterprise environment is still written to X11.

[skeevy420]

The people who skip RHEL/SLES/OEL and use eg Fedora in a business setting either have a huge talent pool to fix issues immediately as they crop or are soon to be unemployed when the first big problem pops up and the business loses tons of money due to downtime.

Based on your comment you might be surprised at how many companies hire non 'rockstar' sysadmins.

I wouldn't recommend most of the newer distributions we like to use unless one's business setting is "managing crap like bids, finances, & purchases on my home computer for my home business".