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RHEL 6 No Longer Supported By Google Chrome
sfcrazy writes "Google has declared Red Hat's RHEL 6 obsolete, showing a notification which says, 'Google Chrome us no longer updating because your operating system is obsolete.' Red Hat evangelist Jan Wilderboer says: 'We release new stable versions of RHEL every 2-3 years. The API/ABI stability is what sets it apart from community distros. Customers need long term stability. Google knows (and uses) that itself internally. By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere. That's not a very encouraging thing.'"
What the heck are they thinking?
Also, RHEL versions are supported for a very long time. You can have systems running one version of RHEL, with security and bugfix updates for many years at a time. The whole point of the distro is stability; you don't have to worry about upgrading every six months.
What is Google thinking?
By cutting the support of enterprise distributions they simply tell me to move elsewhere
So Google wants us to go back to Firefox? ;-)
SCNR
C - the footgun of programming languages
I think RHEL 6 will be supported until 2020.
WTF.
Fedora is not better suited for all workstation tasks. I simply do not have time to deal with things breaking every few weeks, nor do I have time to upgrade my entire OS every year and go through the process of dealing with things breaking as a result. I switched from Fedora to ScientificLinux (a RHEL clone, more or less) for that reason: I have better things to do than to deal with a distro that thinks I should reformat my hard drive every 6 or 12 months. I am not alone in this either; I know a lot of other people who need a reliable workstation more than the latest features of every package.
Palm trees and 8
You don't need a web browser on something that won't even have X installed.
RHEL is for servers, you could use it on a workstation , but fedora is better suited to that task.
Disagree.
Developers and Linux desktop users often need the stability of a commercially supported desktop/workstation distribution. RHEL, although not as bleeding edge as Fedora, is great on a PC.
Then use Debian. Solves both problems.
Uh, no. You're half right, in that there is no need for X on a server. However, as a Linux Admin maintaining a few thousand of those servers, my workstation also runs RHEL, and for damn good reason.
Firstly, I have work to do, that doesn't involve updating my kernel every twenty seconds as Fedora is wont to do. I also have no need for the latest greatest version of GIMP or mediaplayeroftheday, or want to be forced to format and start all over again every 13 months, while still trying to get work done.
RHEL and RHEL clones have a very real place on many peoples' workstations. That said, I'm a Firefox user and have zero interest or need in Chrome. Many of my co-workers do though.
Ubuntu: If at first you don't succeed, blindly slap a sudo in front of it
Does Debian stable promise a 7 year support cycle? When last I checked, Debian stable releases will only be supported for three years, but I am not really a Debian user some perhaps someone can correct me.
What I have trouble understanding is why you are so dismissive of the idea that someone would run RHEL on a workstation. I see a lot of researchers do it, and they all say essentially the same thing I said: they lack the time needed to upgrade frequently and new features are less important than stability. Debian stable may deliver that, but so does RHEL; what exactly do you think makes Debian better for workstations than RHEL?
Palm trees and 8
That the repos have more than a couple packages in it. I use RHEL for servers, getting lots of common linux packages on them is a huge PITA. I get that Redhat wants to limit what they have to support, but it still sucks.
... CentOS 6.3. Google will support CentOS, right?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Vendors don't want to the cost of supporting your platform, so they drop you. To avoid any responsibility, they simply add an error message blaming the user: "Your platform is obsolete." (I guess it's my problem now!) Many users are uniformed or credulous enough to believe it.
Many 'cloud' vendors are going this way; they've simply ignored their commitment to support their users and make the users do the work of supporting vendors (via upgrades and installations). I suspect it's because many users are consumers, aren't aware the vendors have this obligation, and take the 'error' messages at face value.
Worse, I see it in business situations. For example, cloud vendors we pay say that the current Firefox ESR is obsolete, or that we need to deploy browser upgrades office-wide every 5 weeks -- it does nothing for our bottom line, we'd just be doing it to please them.
There needs to be some push-back. We have no reason to absorb these costs.
Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL
There is a reason Chromium has not made it into Fedora's repositories (and by extension, RHEL):
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium
Basically, the problem is this: Chromium depends on extensions to libraries that have not been merged with the main releases of those libraries, and so having Chromium on Fedora would require either static linking (giant packages) or maintain separate sets of libraries just for Chromium. Neither of those options is something that Fedora will do, and if Fedora is unwilling to include a package in its repositories the package as almost no chance of being included in RHEL. Years have passed since the problem was first discussed with Google (see the link), and there has not really been much progress, mostly for the same reasons that RHEL6 is not supported by Chrome: Google does things their way and is not going to change that for someone else (regardless of that other person's reasoning).
Palm trees and 8
I don't think I've ever installed RHEL or CentOS with X Windows. Frankly it annoys me that there are no desktop distros that are maintained for longer than a year or two. Are we really expected to reinstall Linux on a workstation ever year? That scares me because it makes me think the people who are using Linux are just screwing around and not doing real work. Anyone doing real work doesn't have time to reinstall Linux every year.
I guess I just do not see that problem on my own systems. I have a few EPEL and RPMFusion packages, and otherwise everything I need is already in the repositories.
Palm trees and 8
Aside from our own applications, and the stuff provided on EPEL (which is permitted), what is missing from the Red Hat repos that would be required in a corporate environment?
Above you talked about 6-12 months, now it suddenly changed to 7 years...
Read a little more closely. Fedora releases stop being supported after 12 months, and new releases come out every 6 months. RHEL releases lose support after 7 years, with new releases every 3 years or so.
Do you seriously use that old disk images carried over to new HW, or do you perhaps re-install the OS from scratch to new HW a bit more often than that, after all?
This is exactly the point: the support cycle is long enough that I will generally have to reinstall at some point before the 7 years are up, and I can do so at my discretion, when I have time available. I do not buy a new machine every 6-12 months; were I to stick with Fedora, I would be reinstalling (or praying that the upgrade option will work) on the same hardware year after year, and then having to take a few days away from work to rewrite configuration files, find workarounds for deleted features (or worse yet, added "features"), get my machine to connect to the network, etc.
I'm glad to here Ubuntu LTS works for you and lets you get your work done. I'll be over in here RHEL land getting my work done, and I'll be ignoring Google and their efforts to get me to do something else.
Palm trees and 8
Yes, I dare say it's simple mathematics. If the number of users of an OS, multiplied by the Chrome browser share of that OS, multiplied by the revenue per Chrome user on that OS, is less than the cost of continued support, then it's a simple decision to discontinue support.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I can't imagine how I have been getting my work done for all these years without using Google Earth. I guess if you are in a job where Google Earth is required then you would not be running the same desktop I am.
It's actually 10 years; 13 if you pay extra.
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
RHEL has been using yum since version 5. And up2date is GPL, at least if this is the source: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/4/en/os/x86_64/SRPMS/up2date-4.4.5-1.src.rpm
>The headline, while someone oddly phrased, says that Google Chrome will no longer be built with concern running on RHEL 6.
Google Chrome has never been built with concern running on RHEL 6.
Download chrome for linux, it says "For Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE)" , fact which was told in the original googleplus discussion and that the RH evangelist failed to address.
So basically, the headline should be "Due to Red Hat choice to maintain old librairies for long time, chrome now fails to compile on it". Not very sexy.
Well, seems they got rid of it on version 6. Up to version 5 they used up2date, and it was proprietary.
I could be wrong, but I've found a source RPM from RHEL 4 where it says it's GPL. If it ever was proprietary I guess that was many years ago now.
Regardless, the whole RHEL attitude is proprietary, they comply with the GPL because they have to, but do everything in their power to close the system as much as possible, and make it seem privative. If this weren't the case, CentOS wouldn't exist.
Not that it matters, red hat sucks.
They comply with the GPL because they are doing a lot of the development. They employ a ton of developers that are working on many important open source projects, work that everyone benefits from.
Not sure, but I doubt that Debian would distribute it - that would need to be purely on Google's part.
Chromium might get shipped by Debian, but not Chrome. The latter is closed-source, trademarked, etc. They don't even ship Firefox under that name, so the chances of them shipping Chrome are VERY low.
I run Gentoo and they've dropped Chrome. Being closed source it is just a pain to support in general. It packages everything under the sun internally, etc. Chromium is nearly the same and while it takes work it is possible to strip out most of the 3rd-party stuff so that you're linking against system libraries (Gentoo has been one of the leaders in that). For kicks try downloading the source tarball and run du -s * and you'll see just how much junk it bundles.