Is SUSE Linux not an option for Enterprise?
This was all at least 5 years ago, maybe 10, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm sure if I really learned the system it would be fine, but I've got two decades of the Red Hat Way engrained in me. It would be hard to change.
This doesn't make any sense. I've been using OpenSUSE for a decade and there's no package that can be installed via Yast (the GUI) but not via zypper (the CLI).
>There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs.
Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format.
This is absolutely not obvious to a person coming from EL/Fedora (which is the context we are discussing here). Things that are "obvious" to an existing user are not necessarily obvious to new users.
Also I'm not sure what "new" or "existing" users have to do with it. I've never used RHEL so I'm technically a new RHEL user, but I don't have the misconception that distro packages are interchangeable.
I didn't know what the differences were. I learn by doing. Everybody has to install and try a distro for the first time at some point. Unless you are arguing that you were born with innate knowledge of Suse, then at some point you didn't know either.
> Also I'm not sure what "new" or "existing" users have to do with it. I've never used RHEL so I'm technically a new RHEL user, but I don't have the misconception that distro packages are interchangeable.
I would argue that you actually have the misconception, so this is ironically pretty good evidence that "new" or "existing" users does matter.
In the RHEL ecosystem, packages can often be installed on any other (non-Suse) RPM distro, as long as the dependencies are met. For example, Fedora packages can be put on RHEL or CentOS or Alma or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux or Scientific Linux etc. I have some packages built for EL9 that are installed on my Fedora machine right now. Putting on a different distro you run a risk of having broken dependencies, but things are largely the same.
The same is also true for Debian, Ubuntu, and many other .deb distros. This is far more common in the linux ecosystem than not. Suse seems to me to be the odd-one-out here.
No, it's absurd to assume that you can transplant distro packages, not that you can't. And I don't really care to argue with you about this. Your incorrect assumptions are your problem, not mine.
>I would argue that you actually have the misconception, so this is ironically pretty good evidence that "new" or "existing" users does matter.
Wrong. Once again I remind you that you're the one who made the incorrect assumption and got burned by it, so your attempt at deflecting is laughable.
>In the RHEL ecosystem, packages can often be installed on any other (non-Suse) RPM distro, as long as the dependencies are met.
"As long as the dependencies are met" is doing some pretty heavy lifting there, isn't it? And why do you think your attempt to install those RHEL RPMs on SUSE failed?
>For example, Fedora packages can be put on RHEL or CentOS or Alma or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux or Scientific Linux etc.
First of all, four of the distros in that list are intentionally the same distro (RHEL, Alma, Rocky, Oracle), so it is expected that their assumptions and dependencies line up to allow you to install packages built for one on the other.
Second of all, it is absolutely not true that packages from CentOS (assuming we're referring to Stream) and Fedora can always be installed on RHEL or vice versa. The whole point of them being upstream of RHEL is that they can have newer dependencies. Hypothetically Fedora can switch the libfoo package to v3 with a different soname while RHEL still has it as v2, so any package that depends on the v3 soname cannot be installed on a v2 OS or vice versa.
Also, unlike all those distros which are either upstream or downstream of RHEL, SLES is not. So once again I ask, what did you think the difference between RHEL and SLES was? It sounds like you just assumed that SLES is upstream or downstream of RHEL, and made not even a cursory documentation search, nor talked to the SLES reps apparently, to relieve yourself of that assumption.
>I have some packages built for EL9 that are installed on my Fedora machine right now. Putting on a different distro you run a risk of having broken dependencies, but things are largely the same.
"The packages work as long as you ignore all the things that make them not work."
>The same is also true for Debian, Ubuntu, and many other .deb distros. This is far more common in the linux ecosystem than not.
Debian and Ubuntu will have exactly the same problem as the Fedora and RHEL example. Actually worse, because Ubuntu isn't a strict downstream of Debian but a random snapshot of Debian while it's between releases. The packages in Ubuntu can end up not corresponding to any Debian stable nor unstable.
And again, the scenario of taking RPMs from RHEL and trying to put them onto SLES is equivalent to taking RPMs from RHEL and trying to put them onto Debian. If the latter sounds absurd to you, why did you think the former made sense?
>Suse seems to me to be the odd-one-out here.
No, you just have very bad ideas about how Linux works and are weirdly stubborn about correcting them.
This thread brought me back to when I was first messing with Linux distros, I used some insane program called something like 'alien' to try to install .deb packages into Fedore Core, with no idea how wrong minded that whole enterprise was
I'm not going to engage anymore because I'm starting to get irritated by that, and my goal of commenting on HN is to broaden horizons and satisfy curiosity, not to engage in unproductive Internet arguments.
If my criticisms of suse hit a sore point with you, then I apologize. My intent was not to criticize suse. I'm sure it's a fine distro. My intent was to share my experience of moving from RHEL to Suse, as others were discussing changing from RHEL to possibly Suse. If you do that, you will probably have to modify your RPM specs because they won't (or at least didn't back when I tried) work on Suse without changes. Since many RHEL users use it to run their own apps in production, and all their RPM writing experience is RHEL, it's relevant to consider.
This is something that is explicitly warned against by the Debian developers - https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_Frank...