DigitalDilemma @ digdilem @lemmy.ml

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549

Joined

2 yr. ago

And, unlike CentOS, it can't be legally taken over by a corporate entity and changed into something entirely different. Debian is owned by Debian.

But people do get sacked when IBM buys you.

Definitely getting into pedantry now, sorry - but OpenSuse isn't strictly a free version of Suse. Like RHEL, there are some proprietary and commercially restricted software in Suse that doesn't reappear - verbatim - in OpenSuse.

Mmm, maybe. "Joining the dots" also can be read as "taking a lot of bad feeling about X, and some good activity about Y and exaggerating both"

EL is pretty dominant still, although much of that seems to be Rocky/Alma rather than RHEL, but there's no way to get real numbers.

What I have seen is a lot of uptick in Debian and Ubuntu servers. We are moving away from EL towards Debian now because of what we perceive as ongoing instability in the EL ecosystem caused by Redhat. Our business depends on a reliable Linux OS so we're doing the maths.

How come? I'm using it on a laptop now, and on quite a few servers. It does both things pretty well now.

their demand that OpenSUSE rebrand

Slight changing of the tone, there. They have formally requested the change, not demanded.

Maybe that will follow, I can't read the future, but it's not the case today.

I disagree with you. You seem keen to insult people who might hold an alternative opinion, so no doubt you'll attack me as well.

Redhat did far more than just stymie Oracle. That you're saying that suggests you're either deliberately ignoring the facts (Ending CentOS 8 7 years early with no prior announcement, being massively disrespectful to the volunteer CentOS maintainers and support staff), deliberately paywalling source deliberately to target all rebuilders, not just Oracle, generally being amateurish and entitled dicks to the community through their official communications and so on) - or you simply don't know.

About the only thing you say that is correct, is that Redhat do contribute a lot to FOSS, even now. That deserves respect, but it gets harder to do that at a personal level each time they do something simultaneously dumb and selfishly corporate. A lot of people have given Redhat a lot of space and stayed quiet out of respect of their history. Maybe they are right to, but the direction they're heading doesn't look healthy to me.

Sure, although google does the heavy lifting as I've given the strings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Notice

https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/law/civil-law/super-injunction/

I am not very well versed in Australian law, but this indicates to me that free speech is indeed protected in Australia.

It aims to, but it is not a right.

See the two exclusions on the page you linked.

blocked when...

( a ) For respect of the rights or reputations of others; ( b ) For the protection of national security or of public order, or of public health or morals.

In this case, public order may be considered valid, although my personal view is that it wasn't.

In Australia, humour has a long history of bad taste, but a longer history of religious repression through law. Think 1960s America - that describes much of Australian rural culture, with extra bad language. (Although NSW was a lot more tolerant when I travelled around the country)

In the UK, free speech is not possible either. See D-notices, and later super-injunctions to stop media and individuals reporting on facts.

That is of course where Linux shines - you can have an up to date operating system on 12 year old hardware that is secure, usable and responsive In fact, it's the only option.

I was actually talking about the royal 'we' - generally we have become trained to buy new shiny things. Computers, phones, tvs, every few years. Marketing works, folks. Apologies if it rubbed a bit raw for you.

You've accidentally triggered a core thing with me. I've done the poor thing, I have actually had zero money and no way to pay rent. I've had pretty much nothing at one point in my life. Although I've got some spending money now after 35 years of working too hard for it, that never really leaves you - if you've been truly poor, then you'll always be looking for money off deals when buying food, and you'll always be several steps behind the latest hardware just because it doesn't feel right to spend that much. The laptop I'm typing this on was one I found in a skip. It's a HP pavilion about 8 years old. Runs just fine on Debian.

It's interesting to think it's taken a long time before a President was able to so obviously expose the cracks in the American constitution. It took someone entirely without shame or integrity to do so, but he did it during his first term and his second is going to be even more abusive. How does America fix this system going forwards? With the country so divided and polarised, it feels like another civil war might be the only way to solve that, but a civil war is unthinkable. But then so much else that was unthinkable has already happened in recent years.

Windows has an entirely different set of objectives. The coders have to layer on so many services that are insisted upon by marketing that no matter how optimised they make the kernel, it's always doing to be a little boat carrying far too much cargo.

There's also a lot of fairly reliable rumour that the Windows codebase is very messy. Evolved and complicated, supporting many obsolete things and has suffered from different managers over the years changing styles and objectives. We don't know for sure because it's proprietary.

But that said, I use both and find each good for different things. Windows is much more stable than it used to be, and speed is adequate for most things, largely because we've become used to buying better hardware every few years.

(This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)

As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you'd regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn't contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I'm terrible at running an email system but I don't think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.

I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.

Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that's so. But the truth is you won't always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)

You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don't say it's simple or reliable for everyone. If it's simple for you, you're either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.

You're spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of "gmail silently drops my email")

Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that's where much of the world's spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.

My employer paid for a course heavily based on it (No cert, but condensed and more useful), and for my time. One tutor and two pupils over a week.

I found it moderately interesting, and slightly useful. It was the most relevant training available for administrating our (then) CentOS 5/6/7 servers. There were bits that didn't transfer across to CentOS, mostly the proprietary RHEL software aspects which we largely skipped. There was much that was useful for any linux distro.

Highlight for me was properly learning awk during it - I still use that every day.

Got to admit, the zypper argument is compelling.

"zypper up"! is the best upgrade command.

Absolutely. I will never buy another Early Access game - it's buying something that is clearly unfinished, and you the player never get a second chance at the first impression. There's too many other games to expect us to come back and try it again once there's more content and the bugs are ironed out.

I just want to buy a game that's actually finished. Early Access has ruined that first play experience.

As someone who works in an environment with many Windows and Linux VMs, I can pretty accurately state that Windows updates have caused far more critical problems than Linux ones over the past 2 or 3 years. Microsoft's Patch QC has been AWFUL. (Print Nightmare fixes caused ongoing problems that are still breaking printing. You mentioned the EFI change, there's also patching completely failing for machines that had too small a recovery partition. Fine if there was none, or it was large, but all updates fail after that if your machine has a partition that Windows itself silently created.) There's literally dozens of major Windows update failures recently.

As you say, shit happens. Paying for something doesn't make that any less.

Fedora is a fork of Red Hat, the same way Ubuntu is a fork of debian.

I think you've got your ordering and terms a bit confused, there. There's no forking as such going on in the EL ecosystem.

To explain it as simply as I can, as there are quite a few people mixing this up in here.

Fedora is *upstream *of Red Hat (Or RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be exact - Redhat is a company owned by IBM that does a bunch of stuff, not just RHEL).

Fedora feeds into CentOS Stream (Essentially a staging area for RHEL). This has no relation to CentOS Linux, which is dead.

RHEL is then built from CS at point releases and sold commercially through licencing.

There are distros such as Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux and possibly some smaller ones that strive to be near exact clones of RHEL (Rocky claims bug-for-bug compatibility, Alma doesn't any more as they build in a different way) - these follow RHEL's point releases, and might be considered a poor and loose definition of forking, but rebuilding is a more accurate term.

All these distros are under the blanket term of "Enterprise Linux" because it's shaped around RHEL, even though most are free. Historically this worked well, as people learned Enterprise skills using Fedora and Centos Linux which turned into careers (including for me). Then Redhat went a bit mad and that all changed.

The only similarity to Debian/Ubuntu is that Ubuntu uses Debian as a base, and builds upon it. Like RHEL, it adds commercially licenced bits to its distro and rebuilds other parts into something unique, and like RHEL, Rocky, Alma and OEL do with Fedora, it feeds back improvements and development into Debian.