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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.'"
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
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.
What the heck are they thinking?
Maybe they meant to drop support for Red Hat Linux 6, not Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6?
- Red Hat Linux 6.0 (Hedwig), April 26, 1999 (Linux 2.2.5-15)
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago), November 10, 2010 (Linux 2.6.32-71)
Yes, their naming scheme could use some work.....
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 browse the web on my critical servers. I do browse it on my RHEL 6 Workstation (full disclosure: I don't use Chrome), Why do I have a RHEL 6 Workstation? So that my management workstation uses the same OS as my servers and I don't have to think about the differences in OS versions, especially if I need to test something...