[ethbr0]

My Redhat experience always seemed to devolve into "this package that I want has a dependency that isn't listed yet..." (cue 2 hours of recursively and manually tracking down dependencies on the early web).

But I was a lot younger and didn't know a lot of what I do now, so was probably doing everything RPM wrong.

[surge]

I had the dependency spiral issue on every distro (I played with quite a few), compiling with something like Gentoo made it worse. RPM Forge existed, I think the Linux experience in general was bad back then, and RedHat actually was one of the least problematic. Until Ubuntu, it was the easiest and most approachable to use for novices.

[ok123456]

Using redhat before yum, meant visiting rpmfind.net and manually collecting what you needed.

In some ways, RHEL is still like that, because popular packages are usually a major version or two behind if they're even there at all. You have to hunt down an EPEL that has whatever you need.

[ethbr0]

Yeah, I don't miss the old days. Like another poster though, I remember apt-get being decent while pre-yum RedHat was still pretty bad.

But I also realize my perspective was that of a hobbyist, not an enterprise sysadmin who was probably upgrading to well-known versions through known paths.

[ok123456]

I worked with sysadmins who used rpm based distros back then and their experience was basically mine: hunting down the right rpms that both satisfied the constraints and actually worked.