Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 Reaches General Availability

[szymon_g]

I wonder how does it compare to the suse leap 15.1 in terms of performance, stability and availability of applications for home-user, as well as the hardware compatibility.

[Guest]

That's because the target is the Enterprise market and enterprises often buys very expensive applications and drivers (or rather hardware that requires drivers) from companies that do not do releases very often (since ordering just a single change can costs lots of money, sometimes in the million range) so they want a stable Kernel and Userspace ABI to which the suppliers certify their products and then keep them there for years.

Well, they're asking for it. I'd love to see the reaction of people who made a dumb choice to go for such a deal and see the company that developed the drivers go under. You'd think that with a budget you'd be able to go with hardware that's well supported by free software (which is maintained, and can be forked) or even fund development of new free software drivers.

This is i.e why you will find some places that still run Windows XP because that is the latest version that can run the software/hardware that is in use.

So long as the machine is airgapped, this should be fine. Servers, on the other hand, are exposed to the Internet and can be attacked at any point.

[Guest]

Either you have an IT budget and staff that rivals Google or Facebook... or you don't understand how enterprise IT works. Seems more like the latter to me.

With failover, this should be doable on a scale, and it should be possible to automate the process to a pretty far extent, I don't think people are crazy enough to expect admins to manually update tens of machines by hand, the mere idea of it sounds like a great source of mistakes by repetition without paying attention.

People at work expect me to do weekly dependency updates that are supposed to be pushed to production.

[Guest]

By the way, do you use Arch?

I happen to use it because it's the low maintenance distro that works and has software in its repos. I attempted to use Ubuntu as a workstation system, but that operating system just wastes time and isn't flexible enough for me (I sure love settings reverting to what Canonical feels is right, they nail the Windows 10 experience in that regard), not to mention that it needed PPAs to even get stable releases of GNU software, which I happen to depend on for work, as well as the joy in compiling software by hand (with most time wasted on looking up package names of dependencies that I need to install) which is easily available on AUR. If I happen to need some older software, Docker is the perfect solution, as I'm able to get the same environment used in production in seconds (pretty useful for things like analyzing node.js profiler output).

[skeetre]

Why are they using kernel version 4.18, when version 4.19 is receiving longterm support from the Linux foundation? https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html

I had the same thought. And then Windows is going to release 4.19 LTS with WSL2, while RHEL8 is releasing with 4.18. But yeah, RedHat does backport a lot of the stuff and it's more of a hybrid 4.18 kernel.

Also like the comments about uptime on an old kernel. I once kept my own server online/up for over a year straight. I even moved and kept it on an UPS until I got to my new house across town. I kind of look at the kernel like the bios, no need to upgrade unless you're having issues... or major security threats.

[skeetre]

LOL @ Skeevy420's post #40

[klapaucius]

I had the same thought. And then Windows is going to release 4.19 LTS with WSL2, while RHEL8 is releasing with 4.18. But yeah, RedHat does backport a lot of the stuff and it's more of a hybrid 4.18 kernel.

On the other hand, projected EOL of 4.19 is just December 2020, that is too soon anyway compared to the lifetime of a RHEL installation.

[skeetre]

Dec 2020 doesn't seem like very much of LTS. I thought LTS was 5+ years?

I like the ability we have to choose which kernel to use. On my server I'll go with a tried and true kernel that doesn't update, while on my gaming/testing machine, I'll be running 5.2rc until 5.3rc comes out. I can't wait to see how the 5.2 kernel does on the Odroid-N2.

[tessio]

Kernel 3.16 was released 3 Aug 2014 and is still supported.

[retardxfce]

My xfce desktop running debian with low latency kernel runs much faster smoother and more stable than any IBM ""enterprise"" OS.