For example Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Enterprise Linux.
I’m considering switching to RHEL, to get a “professional” Linux, since it’s free if you register an account, but is it worth it?
Is the experience very different from Fedora?
Try it out maybe? You’re not buying a car… There’s not much point going around and asking if you spend 20 mins trying it out and realise you don’t want to use a 5 year old DE.
Basically expect the system will change only when you update to a new version, and that you’ll need to use external PMs like flatpak or nix for all user packages if you plan on doing anything more advanced than browsing and office work.
Personally using rocky Linux. Which is essentially free rhel. It moves slower then fedora.
I have some RHEL machines at work. They are used as VM hosts for windows VMs (CAD software). I set them up, but I also have a huge list of other apps and servers that I manage,develop and support, and so the person that wanted these mahines wanted professional services as an option if I am out or busy with other projects. Plus it allows us to offload liability for security if need be, whereas when I do it, there is anyone else to blame, legally speaking. ( Although so far we have not had a breach on my watch knocks on wood )
I just use fedora at home, I find the they are about the same and I personally wouldn’t pay for the additional services. The package manager is different, but that’s about it.
I know pretty much everyone knows this but distros like Alma and Rocky give you a pretty much identical experience to RHEL for free.
And RHEL itself is free for individuals.
The biggest difference between Fedora and RHEL is that the packages in Fedora change far more frequently, are much more up to date, and are supported for a far shorter period of time.
And RHEL itself is free for individuals.
RHEL is (was) great, but the ‘free’ thing is an absolute annoyance to renew periodically and - importantly - the subscription crap is needless hassle. I use Rocky for the dev stuff and RHEL when it’s prod customer stuff. That spreads out the infrastructure plan to be 1. everything working, and then 2. glue in the subscription bullshit.
Much more stable but much, much older packages at some point. Can you tolerate that?
It is a lot easier these days as Distrobox and Flatpak offer great escape hatches to get newer software when you really need it.
Some of us fiddle with the base OS more than we should. In many ways, I think using something that changes less often is a great idea.
One great thing about RHEL is the documentation. First Red Hat themselves make great stuff. Then there are mountains of third-party materials. Finally, since it changes slowly, whatever issues you are facing have probably been seen before by others and what you find about it on the Internet will still apply.
So Technically No. Our proprietary CAD was only supported and certified to work on RHEL or SUSE. I wanted to test before commiting to a distro. So I went with OpenSUSE leap since it shares SUSE binaries and has same release and service cycle. It installed and functions well on OoenSUSE While not identical to SUSE, I can say all the complaints I saw online of things not working in Linux were working for me. They sort of have to on a paid distro with support, so it seems to carry to OpenSUSE with the same binaries
- nVidia hosts a repo specifically for SUSE and OpenSUSE ( probably RHEL too) it meany adding that nvdia url and updating in Yast2 GUI. Everything works, no tearing, no glitches, nVidia app for thermal settings or tweaking.
2)btrfs works. I saw lots of complaints of people saying btrfs filled their drive, etc. SUSE / OpenSUSE as jobs establishes to monitor number and age of snapshots and remove automatically as needed as well as cleaning tools. It all runs behind the scenes.
- patches, people complain they don’t know if a CVE affects them, if they have applied a patch or not, what package etc. On SUSE/OoenSUSE you have several patch, patches, lp commands that show you what has been released, what level and whether your system has it installed, not required, critical etc. Keeping up with CVE and patches is easy.
I assume RHEL will also have these types of perks to make some aspects easier
RHEL will also have these types of [perquisites]
Yeah. Yum upgrade . The work that goes into a reliably safe, brain-dead, boring update process with a rollback and by-the-checksum validation of installed product is the most unsung part of the distro.
And people really should value the ability to answer
- are we safe from CVE-xxxx-yyyyy? (it’s in the changelog and often an upgrade command like
yum update --cve <CVE-ID>will settle it) - how do we know we installed all of that and it’s valid? (
rpm -V some-RPM)
And ‘how do we know’ is an amazingly powerful question that’s easy to answer on EL and hard as heck to answer on debs or anything with flatpak/snap/pyp/npm nonsense.
