Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by anonunivgrad 2025 days ago
I’m not sure you’re appreciating the kind of operation that RHEL is and why these kinds of businesses use it. They don’t want new features. They want a platform that works, that is approved by government regulators, that doesn’t need engineers to come fix update-caused problems regularly, which will happen with any Linux system that receives major package updates. You’re thinking like a software engineer who will be there to handle these issues. They’re thinking like a hospital that can’t risk downtime and is not a software company, even if they hire a few engineers here and there.
1 comments

Don't make me repeat myself with respect to new features and stability.
You dismiss, elsewhere in this thread, the need to be on the same OS and package versions for years. That’s what people want sometimes. They don’t want to tinker with the system. They don’t need any new functionality, not this year, not next year, not in five years. They built a service, it works, and they can deploy to RHEL and (mostly) forget about it for a long time. As the end of the LTS period approaches, they can do the work to migrate and then forget about it again for a decade. Note that “they” is not just the organization running the system, but also the vendors of bespoke or otherwise niche software used by the organization. Any problem might mean getting billed big bucks per hour of engineering work.