Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Released
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QA is so much better. I had so many production breaking bugs with Ubuntu, especially on bare-metal.
RPM packaging is more fun than DEB. I'm even using it for application deployment with tito[1].
Even the software deployment story got better thanks to the Software Collections (https://www.softwarecollections.org). Rock solid base OS and an up-to-data application stack.
CentOS on the servers + Fedora desktop is a great combination, since you can re-use your whole build infrastructure and skills for your workstations.
Is it (Fedora) much better on the desktop? I dumped Win10 a couple months ago to go back to Ubuntu for the first time since PulseAudio broke everything horribly and I swore off Linux on the Desktop forever (haha), and I was shocked to find that the UIs of both Gnome and KDE have if anything more rough edges than when I last saw them as far as usability goes, performance (UI responsiveness mainly) is generally mediocre to poor, and that both are at least as unstable/buggy as before (KDE significantly worse than Gnome in that regard, though neither's good).
I'd consider jumping ship to an RPM-based distro for the first time since 2004 or so if the desktop experience is less... well, bad, frankly. Going back to Win10 isn't an option. What a garbage fire.
Also its boot splash is the coolest. That's probably the real reason.
I really want gnome2 back but fixed and as a first class citizen, not a fork that the big vendors wish would go away. That had some mileage.
For me, after 10 years of trying to make desktop Linux work the way i wanted it to, macOS is everything I was looking for.
Gnome decided that they had no desire to make a usable DE. They took everything that made it good, threw it out the window, and went as far as they could to make it unusable.
KDE is just a clusterfuck. 2-3 system preferences panels, confusing options, and way too much gloss (glow, transparency, etc).
I spent a long time with tiling window managers, trying to roll a system that felt comfortable and usable to me. And for the most part I succeeded. But the lack of integration with applications is really what ruined it for me. I want a good email client, an address book that can have arbitrary amounts of phone numbers and email addresses per entry, and the ability to give those arbitrary names. I also want my email, address book, and calendar to be aware of each other and play well together. I want a nice way to sync all of that to my mobile devices. I want an experience that feels coherent, instead of something hacked together with bailing twine.
Don't get me wrong. I love Linux. For servers, I would never choose anything else (well, maybe FreeBSD). But it seems like over the last decade, distro developers and desktop environment developers have gone out of their way to sabotage their own efforts and make their software as unappealing as possible.
It's also, fundamentally, closed. In this era of NSA wiretaps and everything else, that's just not acceptable. I have no idea what's in macOS, and I have no confidence Apple will do anything except give the NSA what it wants. With Linux, the attacks are much less obvious.
One killer for me is entirely disparate from yours and that it is pretty damn difficult to drive macOS from the keyboard.
Also ideological reasons, which I totally understand. I prefer FLOSS options when possible, but I'm not dogmatic about it. I understand a lot of people want to make sure every bit of software they are using is open, and I totally get that.
I mean, I still love Linux a great deal, and if DEs were less shit, and applications were more integrated, I would still be running Linux, or would return to it. But I suppose it's simply a matter of what people are comfortable with.
Gnome 3 is still a dumpster fire and KDE got so bad as packaged that the devs felt the need to do Neon.
KDE hasn't been good imo since 3 and Gnome since 2.
I'm an XFCE user because of the Gnome 2 debacle though I've considered MATE a few times there isn't anything about XFCE remotely bad enough to make me seriously consider a switch.
But there are a few better options than the latest KDE or Gnome. These projects have built houses of cards in their attempts to be the biggest and user-friendliest, sacrificing too much stability and quality.
What went wrong for you?
My biggest problem was that I had to turn off Defender because it was causing some delays with the real time scanning.
The updates are a real problem, just all around. Final straw was when one added Outlook back to my start menu.
For all this I got an OS that, actual objectionable things aside, is less pleasant to use than Win7. I'm out. First time I haven't had Windows on something since 3.1.
[edit] by "added to my start menu" I meant "pinned to my task bar"
If I started using Linux desktops most of the time again, I'd go back to what I found to provide the best experience: minimal everything, and manual config of practically the whole system past the base OS (and even some of that). So yeah, i3 or similar would be a likely choice, and probably Arch or Gentoo for the distro (used to love Gentoo).
Building out a desktop environment from ones own choice of components is much more aligned with the Unix philosophy.
It's taken years for my own collection of tools to stabilize enough that it isn't painful to juggle ethernet/wifi/mbim connections. So that my displays are properly laid out (automatically) when I get to the office and plug in my monitor. So that my laptop consistently sleeps when I close the lid, instead of continuing to run in an enclosed bag. So that GPS on my cellular card is usable at the same time as an internet connection. So that Java applications run properly (don't forget to tell your window manager to lie about its name!).
Now that I've wasted so much time over the last decade tweaking and tuning this environment to make it stable and mine, I wouldn't give it up for the world -- and suspect I can't give it up at this point without massive changes to my workflows.
Your examples above are mostly common configuration issues, easy to find with Google. Even a Windows user would likely need to Google many things (e.g. disabling forced updates, privacy settings, registry hacks).
I'm also skeptical that Gnome or KDE will make it significantly easier to solve such configuration issues. Do they even allow settings to be easily moved to another machine? Unfortunately Linux in general will always need some tweaking to work with specific hardware.
You replied suggesting a specific window manager (a single component within a desktop environment) to a post lamenting the rough edges in popular modern DEs. You made no indication that your recommended replacement offers no way to hot plug a monitor, connect to the internet, or even launch an arbitrary application without installing and potentially configuring additional packages. These are very basic features folks have come to expect in a DE.
Making this sort of recommendation is throwing the user headfirst into a painful situation likely to give them an extremely negative impression of i3.
Not explicitly, but I never said configuring or using i3 was simple. It is a very valid point, but is does not refute the fact that i3 is itself simple.
> You made no indication that your recommended replacement offers no way to hot plug a monitor, connect to the internet, or even launch an arbitrary application
I should have written more originally yes, but I have since given my recommendations for these. So why bring it up again?
> Making this sort of recommendation is throwing the user headfirst into a painful situation likely to give them an extremely negative impression of i3.
This is Hackernews and I was replying to knowledgeable posters. I think it is safe to assume they will look into it first without getting into a "painful situation".
Although you do raise some good points, I feel it is your posts that have given an overly negative impression of i3.
Re: stability and QA, couldn't agree more. I only briefly used Ubuntu LTS in production back in '10 and it wasn't a fun experience. I'm sure it has improved but RHEL/CentOS (almost) never lets me down in that regard.
0 - https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities...
Source repo: https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg/php71u
For security reasons, I'm directly building the packages from Git. Works like a charm, and I don't have to include many different third party repos or introduce additional security dependencies.
Generally, Red Hat backports security fixes without incrementing the version number (though that doesn't seem to be the case here).
While generally all LTS distros are quite good these days, I've found that, unsurprisingly, features that are developed heavily or owned by a single distro end up being rocky. RHEL has a lot of things that are not as heavily used elsewhere, and they are far from production quality. For eg., their lvm thin provisioning feature, is pretty rough, and had some very obvious failure cases that could even lead to data loss. I'm guessing that no one uses thinp in production.
There's a whole book-sized section about in the storage docs.
The docker-storage-setup utility, for example, sets it up correctly and enables automatic extension.
We switched to overlayfs and never looked back.
How so? From my experience, these two are equivalent to a high degree and don't differ much, and I've built a lot of both.
This starts to become annoying because all of a sudden you have multiple update processes to keep everything up-to-date, whereas previously, you had one. After being bitten by this at least twice, I shifted everything to Ubuntu.
From the release notes: "The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux."
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterp...
XFS is just not flexible enough, I don't like to be unable to shrink a partition once created.
It looks like I'll be back to ext4 and various kludges then.
That's nice, but the fact RAID 1 still is implemented with critical defects might help understand RH position.
I hope Red Hat will support bcachefs though. I think it's the most promising alternative FS.
The fact btrfs has been yanked from tech preview would tend to suggest feedback has been so bad that they believe it can never make it to being supportable.
At least the random kernel crashes stopped.
With proper care and feeding, it won't run out of metadata either but you need to monitor it closely and run nightly balances. Which probably kill your SSD.
Documentation sucks. Get used to monitor the btrfs IRC channel closely and deduce what to do and what not to do on which kernel version.
It works well for very particular use cases (file server with few random writes and much duplicate data). Cannot recommend it otherwise. Even Docker runs more stable on XFS.
If you have a 2-disk mirror and one disk fails, you can mount the remaining disk one more time to try to recover.
If you try and mount it a second time it is marked permanently read-only and can never be recovered. You need to dump the data and rebuild from scratch.
It's 2017. It's been in development for almost a decade, and getting the simplest RAID case correct hasn't worked.
I ran btrfs for several years, and while the features are great (per-subvolume RAID policies, lightweight snapshots, unRAID-style RAID), I got sick of testing my backups regularly. I wouldn't be surprised if that's not uncommon.
This in turn allows HTTP/2 on Chrome to work again if you're using Nginx as a TLS proxy on your server.
Some more info here; https://ma.ttias.be/rhel-centos-7-4-restores-http2-functiona...
Then there was the old Dell server at a customer's site that we were planning to use for a development/testing system. It had a perfectly functional PERC/4e RAID controller, but Red Hat yanked the driver in 7.0, never mind that Ubuntu Server works perfectly on the same hardware. We ended up picking up a cheap refurbished desktop to use as the development box.
For example, in many setups a max of 8 cores per VM is sufficient, and IIRC there are no longer memory or storage limits for the free tier.
The web admin (which replaces phased out vCenter admin interface) is pretty decent. Between that and the cli you're sorted for most non-enterprise use cases.
But yeah, if you need vMotion and all the other orchestration features, the licensing is...far from free.
I would have been far happier if they retained the driver as an "unsupported" option with a warning during installation, rather than flat-out removing it.
The card in my home server is an Intel SASUC8I reflashed with IT firmware, so it's equivalent to an LSI SAS1068E. The driver for that is listed as "deprecated" in 7.
Lose-lose.
They already supported them for close to 10 years, which is much longer than most hardware lifecycles last nowadays (3-5 years).
You could still build a custom kernel but yeah.
7.0: 4 weeks
7.1: 3 weeks
7.2: 4 weeks
7.3: 5 weeks