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.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Well, maybe not Redhat these days…
Red hat with UBI-Micro still mostly deployed after alpine in enterprise and mission critical server, so let us see if it’ dwindling in next 3-5 years ahead.
Debian.
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.
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.
The support is a huge part of it. Being able to submit a ticket or call in to get help with a strange quirk is extremely valuable to a lot of companies. Additionally, having a licensed distribution like this means there’s built in trust. Red Hat has been a big player in this space forever and are well trusted already, too. So there’s a huge community of people who have used the product to talk to or hire. They also have certifications for rhel, supported by Red Hat, and those carry weight in the industry to some degree.
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.
Debian could stand against it, if https://www.debian.org/consultants/ and https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended consolidated, sadly for now, it isn’t, and I don’t see any project go towards it.
Mostly mission critical server that I deployed in the past, all use RHEL/Clones because their LTS, and stability across packages version.
If for hobbyist, it’s Ubuntu. I think you need to learn more about ansible, container/podman/openshift, and SDN for work. Nowdays, there are some use APT in production, but mostly they switch to dnf because dnf have better way to do downgrade, undo, redo, and config package in production.
This applied mostly for ERP project such as SAP Hanna, SQL Server, DB2, etc… Like it not, Red Hat Dwindling isn’t now, probably 5-10 years ahead, but I’m not sure, as mostly rant about RHEL are in Community. I do know regional linux user group in Indonesia, some are leaving EL group, but they still can’t rip apart most mission critical server on top of RHEL/Clones… so it’s still worth learning RHEL/Clones, and use Fedora for day 2 day task, and learn ubuntu, as well ubuntu pro, for learn deploying critical production server.
Debian and Ubuntu are near, and ubuntu is derived from debian, but if you talk spirit, they are different… If you are conscious about what Red Hat do, stay away from it, but if you are working in corporate, you can’t go without learning it.
Fun fact. At Heineken Netherlands we also happen to use SAP. the backend is using SLES-11 how ever
Well SLES is quite lean near RHEL, they have same rpm/dnf pkg manager, which is near RHEL, but not B2B compatible, or even ABI compatible, but SUSE is okayish, but I don’t know, many corporate that work for aren’t keen using it haha… 😂
Well at least, seems Europe have different kind of market, but having competitor is driving industry forward isn’t it?
Well SAP is from German, but I don’t know why it’s much for popular on top of RHEL, rather than other. I do know Ubuntu support SAP, but never seen one in the wild in Asia Pasific. 😂
Also I remember IBM Watson is on top SLES? 😂😂 Dunno if IBM replace it with Red Hat? Haha… 😂
Where I’m at, that would be Ubuntu, followed by Debian.
Company I’m at runs Windows server. Kill me.
Oh dear god
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’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.
I work for a well known internet company, and its 98% redhat (or derivative) with some alpine and ubuntu scattered about randomly
Depends on context.
If you want to get a job as a “Linux admin” then Red Hat is basically what you want as a “default”. Fedora will give you something you can use at home that’s broadly similar. You will need to learn more than just that though.
Using Fedora at home because you have to use Red Hat at work? NOPE, thanks. Also I wonder if that RHEL focus is mostly american companies? Because here in europe I rarely see RHEL used from my limited perspective.
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.
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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.
My experience in my career has been all RHEL/CentOS. The meat of Linux admin isn’t going to hugely change between most distros tho. Different package mgmt, how the network is configured, etc… Spin up an VM, install it from scratch, and just learn those differences.
