Slashdot Mirror
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?
Why would you be running RHEL on something that you use to browse the web?
Either it is a server and does not have X installed or it is a desktop and RHEL would be a PITA since it has so little software in the repos.
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.
RHEL is used for hardened unix workstations, too. RHEL5 is the only enterprise linux distro I know of worth using with FIPS 140-2 and DoD APL certification, meaning that it's the only option for military workstations other than Windows.
So, take that arrogant "enterprise distro is only for servers" attitude elsewhere, please.
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
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.
RHEL is used for hardened unix workstations, too. RHEL5 is the only enterprise linux distro I know of worth using with FIPS 140-2 and DoD APL certification, meaning that it's the only option for military workstations other than Windows.
And you're allowed to install third-party software in that situation?
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
Red Hat has a desktop version of RHEL, with the same support cycle.
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?
Frankly it annoys me that there are no desktop distros that are maintained for longer than a year or two
Allow me to rid you of your annoyance:
https://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/desktop/
Palm trees and 8
why would you xforward a browser to a computer that already has a browser?
Because, uh, you want to browse from the other computer?
That said, I'm pretty sure the last time I tried to start a remote copy of Firefox, it helpfully started one on the local machine instead. Because, after all, why would you xforward a browser to a computer that already has a browser?
It's actually 10 years; 13 if you pay extra.
https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/
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.