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> Additionally, Red Hat support is so bad these days. It almost reminds me of Microsoft Technet forums of the past. Random 'techs' offering copy-paste solutions and the same bad information.

Yeah, that's been my experience. We had a bad driver package from them completely hose one of our prod systems.

It took 3 days and multiple calls from our CTO to get anyone to seriously look at the issue despite being on the top level support level and it being a Severity 1 issue. The whole "Responses within X hours" thing is a joke when all they give you is "Have you tried rebooting?" or "We're still looking into it" (technically those are response!).

Well that explains a lot. Historically, the basic idea as I understood it was that you could have the software for free (CentOS) and they didn't really mind because they knew they were selling support. If the support is worthless, then they have to try and squeeze money out of the software, which explains their behavior.

Squeezing money out of effectively unsupported software is not sustainable.

Sounds like someone is trying to get their investment back before dumping the whole thing.

Dumping? This is IBM we're talking about. They'll ratchet up the price to fewer and fewer customers, trying to keep themselves in that pocket where they're too useful and expensive to move away from, but still able to hold the irons to their customers.

Nothing you said managed to disagree with what I said.

They bought it, now they’re sucking the marrow out.

The SLA is to respond within X hours, not resolve. So when the SE sends an email that says: "I'm the owner of the case and will reach out after looking at the notes." They have complied with the SLA.

It is revolting to be blocked and not get any help, everyone is anxious, specially when your main product is down (money), but seriously, I just think nobody reads their SLAs and just complains until someone resolves. I suppose it’s a rule of life no one reads terms (yet try to enforce them somehow), but usually their attitude give me the creeps.

And then they have another X hours to respond again

I feel like this trains them too. Like, real issues will have a CTO on the phone, so if there's no CTO on the phone by all means ignore the ticket.

I am always baffled by people using ubuntu because "free".

I get the desire if you want the paid stream. EG, an alternative to Redhat or SuSE as a paid stream.

But if you're going to use Ubuntu, why put up with the snaps, the commercialism, the app store, when you can just use debian?

Every time I hear a reason why, it makes little sense to me. Even though 95% of Ubuntu is Debian, and Ubuntu wouldn't exist without Debian.... people use it.

Ah well.

If I'm not running a desktop, why would I consider running Ubuntu at all? I feel the same about people offering a kneejerk suggestion of Ubuntu as when I'm told to use Docker without actually knowing anything about my needs. Just because I'm wanting to use Linux does not mean I need Ubuntu. Just because I'm deploying code doesn't mean Docker is the solution. But 99% of the time I talk to people, it's all Docker this Docker that.

There is a certain practicality in running the same thing on the server as on your developers' laptops.

Ubuntu and Debian are pretty similar, and using Debian gets rid of things like snap, which I'm glad to be rid of - but it adds an extra level of "well it works on my machine" which I'm not glad for.

If it's going to be hard to get that special different version of Java to work on the server, it should be hard to get it to work on the desktop too :)

Of course the rise of containers has made a lot of this stuff less relevant.

If the headless server has a UI process running that is absolutely wasted resources. Having the same environment for the dev's laptop and the server seems like such a waste of resources. The two things are not the same, so don't try to fit the square peg in the round hole. Whatever these differences are, they should be able to be determined and accounted for in the deployment.

To me, we've gotten a bit lazy and a bit too focused on the wrong things. I feel like this happened when we started running javascript on the server. That was such a shock to the system and all sorts of things had to be done since it just was not the normal way of doing things. Someone decided it'd just be easier to clone the dev's system and deploy that as a server. Like what the actual... I also totally feel the same way about running a Windows Server. Like why on gawds good earth would you ever think that was a good idea?

Ubuntu has a bunch of non-GUI server flavors. It's a common base image for cloud VMs, similar to Debian.

https://ubuntu.com/download/server

I've found the Docker discussion is seen through a better lense when you talk about the tech it's running.

For polygot/hybrid cases where you have a smattering of different languages and supporting technologies/services, docker makes a lot of sense.

If you're all in (for example) on nodejs with a monorepo, it probably doesn't - you're just an "npm install" away from deployment.

Whenever I really dig into the docker passion, I usually find devs who are frustrated by having to manage a million little details to get the dev environment going.

If the language/stack takes that pain away, docker loses most of its value.

my issue is when my process can utilize 100% of CPU available, it makes no sense to have the ability to run several on the same VM. my VM is already one of several on the host. my software stack is already available on the AMI. I don't need the additional time to wait for my AMI to warm up and then warm up Docker. Once my AMI is up, I'm running

Because 15 years ago Ubuntu shipped them distro CDs in the mail for free, and Debian was an entire dvd to download, slowly.

Their more clever friends were compiling Arch, but who has time for that?

I say this tongue in cheek, as a personal lived experience.

This isn't wrong, really. Canonical, for all its flaws, correctly identified a lot of problems with Linux early on -- distribution, usability, application availability -- and then solved them. (Or made strides, anyway.)

It also wasn't shy about marketing and made an effort to have a welcoming community whereas other communities were much less friendly to outsiders.

The free CDs and Canonical's "ground game" in the face of the Red Hat Linux diaspora made it much more successful than other "Debian, but easier" efforts before it.

As a long time Ubuntu user, I figured I'd try Debian a month ago for the same reasons you listed. It's supposed to be 95% the same, so why not. Fresh install, my bluetooth headphones didn't work. Reverted back to Ubuntu and they worked right away.

That's my reason for using Ubuntu instead of Debian - I simply don't care enough to bother with these small things.

Yes, Debian prioritizes software freedom, and Ubuntu starts from Debian but prioritizes having the hardware actually work, so while Debian might be just fine and quite stable for servers, probably not the best choice on laptops for most.

Edit: perhaps this situation has improved for Debian now that non-free firmware support isn't hidden, but it's been a while since I installed Debian on a new machine.

Except Ubuntu did what Fedora/RH didn't used to do - break my shit.

Everything would work great, then bam giant updates, everything broken (bluetooth, wifi, video, graphics cards, audio), have to start from scratch learning some new fad Ubuntu folk had invented.

When I want to tinker or try out cool-new-tech, then sure, a platform like Ubuntu is great - semi-stable, half-working software.

When I don't, Debian/CentOS are hands down just better. Sure, I have to configure my bluetooth, but I have to do it just once _and it never breaks_.

Fedora used to be pretty great, then some personalities with inflated opinions of themselves started ruining the relative stability.

There are many reasons, LTS, security kernel patches etc ... Ubuntu is not 95% Debian, as a matter of fact Debian got LTS only recently, before that you were out of luck.

I still have bad memories of going to the DC with a USB stick with network driver on them because the Dell server with Debian on it would not ship with non proprietary firmware / drivers.

This is a thing of the past.

From the firmware wiki at debian.org:

"The Debian project took the decision in October 2022 to create a new repository component non-free-firmware, and include its content on installation media for the upcoming Debian 12 release (bookworm) to make things easier for our users. This change was implemented in time for the bookworm alpha 2 release of debian-installer in February 2023, and all d-i releases and daily and weekly images since then all include firmware."

Previously one had to either download the needed firmware separately, or a bootable image containing it so that it was accessible during install. Many users having problems with proprietary hardware didn't know they could just grab the install image with included firmware at https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in... But I blame Debian for this because their site historically has been excellent at hiding stuff.

It's supported, and it's known.

Ubuntu = Linux for a lot of people these days, kind of like Red Hat was to us old guys.

> this has caused a lot of software vendors to drop RHEL/CentOS support

Can you list a few? It's good to keep up to date on how this is changing. Thanks!

Ansys for one

https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-supp...

Veeam doesn't support CentOS stream or 9, there's been a bunch of things here and there. I notice many are moving to Ubuntu. I had to go through all of our vendors last year, and the nice thing about CentOS was almost everyone supported it. Now there's no 'gold standard'.

It says they support RHEL:

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.8, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 (64-bit)"

It supports old RHEL, but not 9.

So not stream (OP never stated RHEL, he stated many packages not supporting stream) AND it doesn't support RHEL 9 which came out almost 2 years ago.

If you kept your RHEL 8.x server updated, it would have been on 8.7 for over a year.

Thanks! When you say Veeam doesn’t support RHEL 9, does that mean it can’t backup RHEL 9 clients due to a lack of agent, or something else?

Part of it was that CentOS Stream reversed the CentOS stability level vs. Fedora; a lot of the vendors targeting CentOS/RHEL were looking for something fairly fixed. CentOS made sure they could also support folks who didn't want to pay for RHEL.

>But Red Hat really angers me with their decisions during the last few years.

Probably because Red Hat is no longer making those decisions

Why not SAP on SLES? Its a defacto standard on both sides of the pond.

Because corporate is in bed with IBM? Not sure.

Yep unity too, they only support up to centos 7 and Ubuntu.

I don't really like using snaps for everything so this is a bit annoying. But at the moment I'm mainly devving for VR so i need to be on Windows anyway.