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?
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.
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.
A lot of my clients were using CentOS. Not sure what’ll happen next now that Red Hat killed CentOD.
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.
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.
RedHat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu.
All are good choices.
Not Linux but there are still a of Unix System V systems out there too. AIX, Solaris and HP-UX. Harder to learn as very much not open source software (although there is the Illumos project with distros like OpenIndiana).
Wow, last time I managed HP-UX, SunOS/Solaris, AIX, and Irix, was last century…
Unfortunately AIX in particular is very much still in use in my industry. Its slowly being phased out but is very much still there.
In banking I suppose? Or airline? Having hard time seeing AS400 in Banking… at least some are using IBM Z nowdays…
Healthcare. People keep systems for decades.
I see. I seen some still using palmOS. Is there still any palmOS in production?
I once worked in for a small publishing company years ago, circa 2005, where they used CentOS on the desktop and server environments. Deploying a new desktop was as simple as using kickstart. They had their infrastructure down to a science.
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.
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.
Ubuntu, RedHat, AWS Linux, Arch. Honestly distros in production are pretty similar since they’re all headless and pretty pared-down. If you just know the logistics of a few package managers and init systems you’ll be good.
I’m surprised to see arch on your list, I know everything runs in containers now but arch seems way too unstable O_o
By unstable I don’t mean “buggy”, but “you will have to adapt to new major version of package XXX or you can’t fetch updates anymore, so no security patches anymore”.
