Comment by chunkyks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chunkyks | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who does both sysadmin work, and programming/modeling&simulation work, at a significant research nonprofit in the US...

RedHat is stable: Which has the benefit that it's stable, and the cost that it's always behind the times.

Security is deadly serious, and RedHat make it easy. STIGs are available for RHEL; they're also available for SuSE [very recently] and Ubuntu LTS releases, but we're heavily invested in RHEL infrastructure, training, etc, so switching to Canonical would be expensive and hard. A few years ago I earnestly looked at us coming up to speed on Ubuntu, but with Canonical's recent behaviour around packaging I'm kind of glad we didn't.

We rolled with CentOS in a few places for a while [all the benefits of the training and experience], but the recent changes in that make it useless for our needs.

I've been around for long enough that I remember when Linux sucked; I started using it around 1997. Nowadays, I find that all modern distros are in the same ballpark of "pretty much work pretty much all the time"; so while I don't love RHEL, it's been a safe stable choice and doesn't bite me in the ass.

I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/

  I think this was linked on HN the other day, and it basically covers anyone using RHEL: https://boringtechnology.club/

God, I think you can tell the real engineers that have gone through the trial by fire and the ones that haven't simply by how much they agree with that presentation. At some point in your career, at 2AM when your debugging that fantastic new opensource library, for the 10th time, that you rewrote everything because it did exactly what you needed, and made you a hero for a week, you switch from gabbing the latest cool thing to picking those old technologies that everyone knows why they suck.

Because knowing why something sucks when you pick it, is more important than knowing why its good.

RHEL sucks because in 10 years you will be running some horrendously "outdated" software. Its fantastic because over those 10 years you will have made a pile of money selling your product and adding features rather than spending cycles being an upgrade monkey for things you didn't know you needed until someone sold them to you. And your customers, they don't care what OS your running as long as its reliable. Which is something RH provides in spades.

Ten years, yep, sounds about right. We're finally getting rid of our last few RHEL6 boxes. It got pretty long in the tooth at the end there, but it never gave me any hassle.

Especially if you know why it sucks you can work around the suckage; but 99% of everything sucks, so if you don't know why the new shiny thing sucks, you're gonna have to find that out yourself, under fire.

(This can even happen between various old and established things; if you know MySQL and all its warts well, perhaps switching to the relatively unknown PostgreSQL "because it's better" isn't the best use of your time. You should be able to explain why and why not before making the switch. When in doubt, do what everyone else is doing - unless it's your differentiator.)

In the software world, RH is not just old, it's practically antique. Their kernel age can really hold you back. Compare it to the way SLES releases their minor versions. I've done alot of work with RH, but I do not recommend it or enjoy it.

If all you are doing is running a webserver, java app, and database the kernel version pretty much doesn't matter. This is the use case most companies are in.

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