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by bubblethink 1978 days ago
I've gone back and forth on selinux (and a bunch of other in-house stuff that RHEL makes). Yes, it has improved over the years, but it still breaks a lot. The thing with RHEL is that you really need to be paying for the support to get any value out of it. With CentOS or this beggar subscription level, you are better off using Debian or Ubuntu, because when shit breaks, all you'll do is create a bug report in any OS. With Debian or Ubuntu, you have a slightly better chance at recovery. RHEL has a strict demarcation between support levels, features, release timelines, etc. So if you report a bug to RHEL, they may not backport the fix even if it fixed upstream. And then you are just stuck.
1 comments
Conan_Kudo 1977 days ago
> RHEL has a strict demarcation between support levels, features, release timelines, etc. So if you report a bug to RHEL, they may not backport the fix even if it fixed upstream. And then you are just stuck.

This is changing with CentOS Stream. Bugs can be filed against CentOS Stream in the Red Hat Bugzilla and they will do something with that bug report. Additionally, if you know what to backport to fix it, you can submit pull requests on any package in CentOS Stream to have it reviewed and merged to fix your issue. The fix would then be built and released within days of merging your fix.

From my perspective, that's pretty golden for an Enterprise Linux platform. The only other that's like that is openSUSE Leap/SUSE Linux Enterprise.

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bubblethink 1977 days ago
Stream is a bit closer than Fedora, but the larger point of needing paid support remains. The slow cadence of RHEL means that unless you are paying for support, things get kind of frozen around the .5 release. After that, they just won't backport fixes, not even regressions, unless a) You are paying, b) It's really a critical security bug. I don't think that will change with Stream.

To summarize, the RHEL model of releasing an OS every 5 years with these staggered upstreams is really not that great. It creates immense inertia and pain down the road. RedHat itself hasn't been able to port its own offerings like Satellite to RHEL 8. I would rather have the Ubuntu cadence of LTS releases every 2 years so that you are at most 2 years away from any fixes you need.

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Conan_Kudo 1977 days ago
RHEL major releases are every 3 years now.

Matthew Miller (@mattdm) tweeted out the "Fedora->RHEL formula": https://twitter.com/mattdm/status/1349037318200561665

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