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Comment by pdevr | Hacker News Reader

I am more of a Debian/Ubuntu guy, but it is indeed unfair to call RedHat's distribution super complicated. RHEL is not that difficult to maintain. CentOS was the default OS used by many hosting companies in the past, before technology changes occurred. It was fairly easy to maintain.

Agree with you that many of the salesman are typically technology-agnostic [I use the term "agnostic" in the sense it is used to define religious belief :) ]. They have capable technical guys supporting the salesmen, though.

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I use Artix now - love it because it is so easy to make packages or at least update one that you need to update for some reason. RPMs are super super difficult much of the time.

I think the most horrible bit is selinux - that really upped the level of difficulty a lot. I'm also really fed up with Fedora's frequent releases - so hard to keep your machine current because upgrading usually only works properly once or twice and then you need to do a reinstall. That might be harsh - maybe 3 times but you still end up having to do it or lose updates.

For me this feels liked they've reached a peak of complexity. Now there are flatpacks and other things to torture us with and it's obviously not just them.

I found something that suits me at last and am typing to you from it now. Rolling updates so I NEVER have to do a full upgrade - it's so liberating. I can make choices like not having systemd - I use dinit and it's fine. Development packages are always installed so I want to build something from source and I never have to worry about whether the header files I need are there.

So far I cannot find a negative. OK it was a nuisance to make pipewire start automatically and I probably haven't done it right yet - not good for any new users - but that's it.

The most horrible bit about Microsoft is that pesky release of new mandated security features! My windows 7 has everything just the way I like it /s

your characterization of red hat makes sense from where it sounds like you’re coming from but you miss the mark a bit I feel

RHEL isn’t meant for the everyday developer and red hat does a lousy job enabling them. Ubuntu and Debian do a much better job as is proven by the wide availability of developer tools on Ubuntu/Debian.

But look at the enterprise software market share, of which red hat focuses on entirely — canonical has a sub 5% market share for enterprise Linux or something pathetic along those lines while RHEL is over 85% or something close. Canonical has done the opposite by catering to workstations and developers and have done exquisite things with their workstations but their real enterprise servers suck.

SElinux isn’t meant to just run static on your box while you’re using it to everyday browse or develop that’d be brutal. It’s meant to secure an application or files with predefined egress based on business logic.

Now on the other hand, fedora— it’s upstream my man. Frequent releases is… the point? it’s community based upstream development if you’re looking for the latest features it’s perfect but you’re also getting the latest bugs.

Ubuntu sounds appropriate for you! That doesn’t mean RHEL or fedora “has reached peak complexity”

If you wanted RHEL or Cent/Rocky/Alma:

- disable selinux on your home or personal workstation. you can get granular with how to do it too if you choose. - automate your patching it takes 5 minutes one time - if you want RHEL benefits with Fedora-adjacent (but not as buggy) releases you’re describing what is now CentOS Stream which is also a rolling-release distro

I felt similar to you last year but my company uses RHEL and we just did some worth while quick training. When explained in ways that make sense, it makes sense. Unfortunately I think red hat has been lackluster several times over on how to say what I just said

edit: meant to add that I hope this helps!

Sure, if you're looking to write some commercial application you don't want to recompile it twice a week and then you go for something stable with compatibility guarantees like RedHat. Plus it's a big company and it fixes security bugs and you can probably get some kind of guaranteed support (never bought it but I expect it's true).

I think the whole purpose of RedHat in a way (and of Ubuntu LTS) is the limiting of change.

If you WANT change though, Fedora doesn't compare well to rolling distributions IMO. It has lots of updates but with lots of inconvenience. Rolling distributions just take change continuously forever - there's never a discontinuity so they're very easy to use.

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