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How Red Hat Can Recapture Developer Interest
snydeq writes: Developers are embracing a range of open source technologies, writes Matt Asay, virtually none of which are supported or sold by Red Hat, the purported open source leader. "Ask a CIO her choice to run mission-critical workloads, and her answer is a near immediate 'Red Hat.' Ask her developers what they prefer, however, and it's Ubuntu. Outside the operating system, according to AngelList data compiled by Leo Polovets, these developers go with MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL for their database; Chef or Puppet for configuration; and ElasticSearch or Solr for search. None of this technology is developed by Red Hat. Yet all of this technology is what the next generation of developers is using to build modern applications. Given that developers are the new kingmakers, Red Hat needs to get out in front of the developer freight train if it wants to remain relevant for the next 20 years, much less the next two."
For the "big stuff", much of what's listed in the summary, they probably can't create the bandwagon. The reason developers jump on something like that is because it's already in widespread use. All the "big stuff" already has leaders. The best RH could hope to do is to buy some of those out and take them over.
OTOH, do we developers want that? Look at the controversy surrounding systemd, directly developed by RH. If that's a sample of what they do, I'm not so keen for their solutions.
The days of hobbyists writing postgresql is long gone. Those teams include people being paid from large software companies who are keeping their fingers in the pie. Just like RedHat does.
From working in Linux-based IT for nearly a decade now, IT departments get very frustrated by Red Hat's package management and the concept of needing both an Entitlement and various Channels to get updates; on the flip side of this summary is Ubuntu, which IT departments can't stand due to it's constant change and instable nature. Every IT department I've worked in and with seems to prefer administering and deploying Debian and battles with devs on Ubuntu and management on Red Hat.
Every one of these is supported by Red Hat. Call them out for other things, but do your research first. I'm upgrading MySQL from 5.1 to 5.5 and many of these are specifically in new Red Hat Collections.
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Software_Collections/1/html-single/1.1_Release_Notes/index.html#sect-Installation_and_Usage-Install
I don't think that's a cut-and-dry sort of thing. As a developer, I hate the fact that Ubuntu is changing so quickly that I can't keep up. Leading edge is fine, but bleeding edge gets blood everywhere.
The great benefit of Red Hat is that it's stable and supported for a very long time, like 20 years. They don't change anything major in a release, and releases are few and far between. This is great for 'Enterprise' stuff, but the web is moving quickly and package support for RHEL boxes isn't great.
Having said that, where I work we have lots of stuff on RHEL/CentOS, and more and more stuff on Ubuntu. The Ubuntu stuff keeps me awake at night - literally. It's always falling over. I have never experience a kernel like the one the Ubuntu team are putting are. It's absolutely atrocious. The biggest problem is that the software we need to use has better support for Ubuntu than RHEL, so we're stuck using a dire OS to run it on.
The RHEL and CentOS boxes we have are rock solid stable and have never really given us significant issues. I walk into the office and get a new Ubuntu problem every day.
(FWIW I use Debian for all my own stuff exclusively, so I know my way around Debian-derivatives - this isn't a configuration issue).
Right on! That is why we use Sun.
That last sentence should have been, "....remain relevant for the next two years, much less the next 20."
"MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL ... Chef or Puppet ... ElasticSearch or Solr" all run fine on Red Hat; the only software that has been much of a problem here is Google Chrome.
Ubuntu has made it much easier than Red Hat CentOS to grab an image to spin up VMs; that has pushed some of developers to Ubuntu because of the ease of popping up a (Vagrant) VM in VirtualBox (or OpenStack) with real, updated first-party images.
It's worth mentioning that Ceylon (Red Hat backed) is pretty sweet:
http://ceylon-lang.org/
Developer adoption is moving slowly, though.
Ask a developer who has recently made or tried to make the transition from Windows to Linux and they expect inconsistency, plus doesn't everyone use it? Ask a seasoned Linux dev and they wouldn't touch Ubuntu with Bill Gates' $INSERT_APPENDAGE_HERE
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The tension is stability versus the latest tech. RedHat purposely moves very, very slowly. The same can be said about Debian stable. As an admin I like slow moving targets. The problem is that developers want to use the latest stuff. So what does RedHat do about this? I think they are trying to solve it in two ways. First is their Software Collections. These are packages that site outside the base OS and are easy to pivot to the newer version. This allows for multiple versions of things like Python to be installed in parallel. Very handy!
Another thing that is helping quite a bit is Docker. RedHat is big on Docker. By packaging containers as apps, this allows a developer to easily control the dependencies outside of the OS that the app is running on. This makes everyone happy! Fedora is tracking some interesting tooling with Docker (geard, os-tree).
I like that RedHat tries to solve bigger problems than just packing and releasing a distro. They are trying to make things manageable (see FreeIPA, OpenLMI, RDO, CloudForms, oVirt)
Personally, I like RedHat. I like Debian. I run Fedora on my desktop and notebook. I maintain a CI/CD pipeline on RedHat at work. I never jumped on the Ubuntu bandwagon. It seems to me that Ubuntu has made quite a few more mis-steps in their short existence than RedHat has over the years. I get the feeling that a lot of people are just dropping back to Debian, which is just fine with me!
And nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
When someone asks me to connect to a Linux server, I think "Cool". When I find out it's Ubuntu I think they probably don't know much about Linux or they wouldn't be running Ubuntu as a server. My sampling is probably biased, but most of the Ubuntu user's I've met are beginning desktop users.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
It was funny the first time, but this is really annoying now.
Then, I ran up to him, shook him around, and screamed, "Where is it!? Where is my computer!?"
I automatically read this in Christian Bale Batman voice XD
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why? Red Hat has been the one distro that spearheaded Linux adoption in the enterprise. It's stable has very long support life cycle and if you do not want to pay licensing you can (and many startups do) use Centos.
I hear people complaining about rpm/yum. Guess what. Many of us have extensive experience with it and have no problems with it. Creating repo cache is fairly easy and allows you to have a total control of what is deployed to your server. And yes I do like dpkg and apt-get. They are very nice tools.
The main reason I see ubuntu getting traction is because of RedHat making RHEL not available for download and because developers got their first steps in ubuntu. because "it's easier" and has a nicer "desktop".
I think RedHat needs to backpedal in Fedora/RHEL and go back to a single distro. Something like *Desktop/Developer edition (RHDE) and *Enterprise Edition (RHEL) and build a nice and focused distro with all the common repos already enabled in RHDE. So that newbies can have a better experience. Developers need to easily get running thing need on a fresh build of (RHDE). Something like this: yum install passenger-puppet-master (and bam!) yum install maven
yum install django
yum install passenger-rails-app
yum install saltstack
yum install eclipse-openjdk-stack
Just a few samples but you get the idea. Make it easy for the developer and they will come.
BSD licensed software can't be stolen....
More than a decade ago, when they abandoned desktop and regular users and only focused on enterprise, they made their biggest mistake. Where do you think Ubuntu Server users come from?
Even most of us who are highly knowledgeable and understand Linux to it's most profound depths appreciate a good desktop experience. The fact we can compile a kernel or any software does not mean we prefer that to a nice end-user experience.
It is still not too late for RedHat, and given the horrible direction Ubuntu has been going recently (trying to run on Phones and Tablets), and the fact that the tablet fad is starting to pass and the desktop did not die (as evidenced by Microsoft's direction with Windows 9), they have a great chance to re-capture the desktop user. They will definitely not be able to do that by supporting Gnome 3 (something a large part of desktop users hate, even if a small minority likes it), and their very unfriendly package manager. They now have Ubuntu as example of how to do some things right, and as proof that this is a desirable business direction.
Everyone immediately disables SELinux, and people need to reinvent how they manage the system, all for no real return, unless you're one of the .1% who those technologies are targeted at. Make your system normal Unix, not weird Unix, and people will stay interested. Companies don't like moving targets.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm not sexist or anything, but am I the only one that gets annoyed when people, in their strive to be as PC as possible, refer to a theoretical person by the female form as opposed to the male form? I mean it makes sense when talking about a field where it is women dominated, but how many women CIO's exist, compared to men?
Red Hat use to have a distribution for everyone. It was one of the most popular Linux distributions. Then it moved to Red Hat Enterprise, and that really caused many of the Linux users to find something else and switch. Fedora is nice and all, but it felt like Red Hat throwing a bone.
Ubuntu came up and took its place as the distribution for everyone. Red Hat got stuck in the stuffy enterprise market.
As most people who know, Enterprise software means over priced software, that barely works, but somehow it makes executives feel good about using it, probably because they need a full IT Staff just to keep it running.
So companies who want to follow the buzzards of agile and nimble, have swapped to non-Red Hat based systems.
Nothing technical, just bad PR from Red Hat, that made them loose their fan base.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From admirable b eginning, Ubuntu has become a literal 'Dog's Breakfast'.
For a Server, I'd choose either RHEL/CentOS or SUSE.
They also make decent destops. Stable and consistent unlike the Ubuntu mess that is totally beholden to the commercial aims of Canonical which IMHO will fail.
There are a couple of problems from our (Operations) perspective.
1. The infrastructure needs to be supported as well. If the various necessary agents (backups, monitoring, application distribution) only work on Red Hat (or CentOS) then Red Hat is what's acceptable in the production environment.
2. The staff needs to be in place to support it. We have three major Operating Systems we support (team of 5 admins). Solaris, HP-UX, and Red Hat/CentOS. With almost 1,100 systems, environments outside our expertise are difficult to manage. Of those 1,100 systems a very very small percentage are Ubuntu (and Suse, Fedora, Mint) and they aren't supported to the level of the primary systems.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
All of the new tech in the article is supported, developed, led by consortium with RedHat involvement, funding, support, etc.
Sure, loads of developers use Ubuntu. It's pretty loose and sloppy from a sysadmin viewpoint (OK. My viewpoint). Loads of developers use CentOS and Fedora. There's a strange media perception that Ubuntu is the darling of the Internet. As a sysadmin who pays the mortgage and puts kids through college on RHEL, I don't see how to do that with Ubunutu. It's designed for standalone machines, one-offs, personal level stuff.
I do see RedHat involved in the large scale enterprise processes that make sense: OpenStack, FreeIPA, Ovirt, Docker, SELinux, and the list goes on. And RedHat is a big contributor to the Linux Kernel.
Are there many Ubuntu installs at Amazon Cloud? Sure. Lots of devels load up several at a time for testing. And that's good because so much of the enterprise development that's been done by RedHat and friends just won't work on Ubunutu. Different philosophies create different configurations.
guess who contribute the most to openstack KVM and QEMU ?
If only i had mod points!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I would never use Ubuntu for any serious endeavor. It is a vanity distro which is completely dependent on the whim of its self appointed Benevolent Dictator for Life, Mark Shuttleworth. Given Canonical's yearly financial losses it is only a matter of time until he calls it quits to preserve his personal wealth.
Canonical are the people whose forums were hacked, user information stolen, and remained down for two weeks while they attempted to restore backups and patch the exploit. They release by far the buggiest linux distribution in history, in fact it is based on Debian Unstable.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS includes the 3.13 version of the Linux kernel. This is not an upstream long term supported kernel. This means that the Ubuntu maintainers will have to do all the backporting work without any help from the community, for five years, to a kernel that no other distribution will use.
Add the increasing numbers of open source developers infuriated by Canonical's misdeeds with Mir, Unity, and Upstart, and it is clear that Ubuntu is the distro with the challenge to remain relevant.
Seek some help my friend, because you're becoming an annoyance here.
Do you work for Red Hat? Why is this even a question other than you have some motive to support this company.
Why not ask the question, "How can more people get involved in buying General Mills cereals?"
Another /. up the backside article.
To any newbies that don't know how to do it, you can hide all of redelm's spam crap. Click his name, then click the little orb by his name, and make him a foe.
Then go the comments preferences page, scroll down, and set a -5 (or whatever) modifier to your foes. You won't have to see his crap again.
Most people I know that used Ubuntu.... Have moved on to Mint.
This story probably doesn't make Gavin King happy.
Red Hat has been working on a new programming language called Ceylon, primarily as an alternative to Java, although it also compiles to Javascript. It is aimed at application/business software, providing better compile time guarantees than Java with a better overall design, syntax and reuse (module system) model. 1.0 was released about six months ago and 1.1 is imminent.
I'd like to see Ceylon succeed because I think it's a large improvement over Java. The thinking behind it is rigorous and rooted in long experience with real application development. If it catches on Red Hat could capture a lot of developer interest.
When I had a choice in Linux desktop, it was always Fedora because I was sued to it, and even with its bleeding edge slant, it rarely fell over with updates even with some third party repos in my mix. That was from Fedora 1 though like 16? They're up to 20 now so I have some catching up to do!
I don't know if anyone's mentioned that Redhat owns JBoss and all the tools and technologies around that which are very popular in the enterprise development markets. When I think of Redhat, I see a company:
1. Does server-side well for everything except for microsoft centric computing needs
2. Struggling to get into cloud computing (not so well)
3. Token support for Linux desktops which is fine for the not-so-large revenue market that it entails
Bye!
I think you're kind of missing the point. Developers don't think "hey, I know Ubuntu/Mint, and it works great for me, but yum just got a little bit friendlier? Forget everything I know, I'm installing Red Hat."
People change distributions with a purpose. For me personally the odyssey was:
Mandrake: because (I kid you not) it came on a CD in a Linux magazine
Gentoo: because of the performance gains
Mandrake: because (unlike Gentoo) you don't have to spend half your life compiling
Ubuntu: they did all the annoying stuff (eg. making Flash work) for me
Mint: Shuttleworth gave the middle finger to Ubuntu community vs. Mint 3s their community
The point is, no one is going back to Red Hat unless it offers something significant that their current distro doesn't (besides just yum). Making Red Hat one distro instead of two doesn't give me a reason to leave Mint. Making yum friendlier doesn't give me a reason either. At best changes like that might help stem the tide of departing Red Hat users ("why do I need Ubuntu, Red Hat finally got friendly") but if Red Hat ever wants to become a dominant distro again they have to offer a compelling reason to switch.
Grrr, /. swallowed my angle bracket. That's supposed to be "Mint *hearts* their community", not "Mint 3s their community".
Agile developers expect agile everything. Ubuntu happens to just be a happy compromise between agile and waterfall.
If you look at RHEL, it's 5-10 year old packages, kept alive by an enormous engineering team that backports fixes to old, dead software, which creates a huge pile of technical debt for any developer trying to use "modern", highly modular frameworks.
As far as developers go, In the Ruby, Python, and Node ecosystems, anything that's not the latest doesn't exist. They don't use the system package management, they use gem, pip, and npm. They really don't care about the underlying OS, until it gets in the way, and getting in the way is exactly what a decade-old OS does.
Just to throw out an example. Take some modern ruby on rails application, say Discourse. (discourse.org). Go download a tarball from github. Now try to make it work with nothing but software from the official RHEL repository. Let me know how that works out for you. After you tear out all your hair and skin trying to do that, try to get the pieces from 3rd party repos that will make that work. See how much you have to bring in as far as new libraries and new packages just to make it work. It's still a nightmare even with the 3rd party repos, and that RHEL support contract doesn't cover them - every single piece that's likely to break your application, is now outside of your support agreement, so your company is now wasting at least $799/year for support.
As soon as they start trying to develop on RHEL, the dirty hacks start. There are things missing - the versions of software that they need to make their dependancies work don't exist on RHEL. They end up in a kind of dependancy hell fighting with libraries that are a decade too old to compile their dependancies. One thing leads to another. Eventually, you recreate an entire current OS in /usr/local, or install one piece by piece from 3rd party repositories. At that point, it's not RHEL anymore. It might still say it's RHEL, but it's a bastardized system that looks more like an evil child of Gentoo and Fedora. (both of which are fine distributions by the way, just they aren't meant to crossbreed). The only thing you have left of RHEL at that point are the parts your application doesn't care about, which is probably not much.
Or, you can attempt to containerize with kvm, chroots, or lxc, which, while not breaking the underlying system as badly, means the application is really running on something other than RHEL.
If Red Hat wants developers back, they are going to have to be able to deliver a product with an agressive delivery schedule, maybe even a rolling release, and be able to deliver the kind of support to make operations feel good. That's a whole new territory, that nobody has touched yet, but if they are up to the challenge of keeping decade old software on life support, they are probably up to the challenge of an agile OS.
Let's start with Redhat cleaning up the mess that a sysadmin has to slog through to set up and run a Red Hat machine.
Fire poettering, get rid of all his crap. Then clean house. After that, you can think of something.
Or maybe not. RPM isn't a great track record either.
If you install the newer packages you want, who cares what the "default" package is?
Personally I'd much rather a distro that lets me choose which version of packages to install rather than shoving one down my throat randomly during updates of the system.
Granted, the Debian stable I run isn't full of the latest shiny, shiny, but it isn't causing update problems by rolling out new versions of packages, either. Both Debian stable and RedHat RHEL are focused on stability, not bleeding edge development. No one in their right mind runs production systems on untested versions of packages, and no one (not even banks) can afford to do constant regression testing on the latest releases of software just because it's "new."
I'm constantly surprised at how many people opt for downloading the "production" version of my own project, even though that really was just a peg in the dirt of functionality, not some big fancy schmancy roll-out that went through more testing than other releases. There are bug fixes and new features in the latest and greatest, but a lot of people don't want that -- they want that peg in the dirt, and are content to wait for an SP1 to get access to the new features and bug fixes.
Don't forget it can often take a few months to properly regression test software. It isn't just an issue of booting with the latest version and making sure it starts running -- it's testing how it responds to having network cables yanked, power flipped off hard, sometimes even yanking hardware components while a box is running. Serious servers aren't something you just push out after running them with a dozen users for a week.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Dude, the question was about Enterprise servers. Do your development on Mint, that's just fine, but are you really going to deploy your production enterprise application on a farm of ... Mint servers? really?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
> Everyone immediately disables SELinux
I hope you're talking about your personal desktop and not publicly accessible servers. Many years ago, many packages didn't have SELinux policies, and that was painful. Disabling it was rather tempting. With all the many Linux computers I manage, I haven't run into a single SELinux related issue in several years. If you're disabling it now based on your experience in 2007, it might be worth taking another look.
As to "everyone immediately disables", about 10% disable it these days. 90% don't.
Mint 3s
If you look at the "3" sideways, it looks like a pair of asscheeks hanging ominously over a possible target...
Soon enough every distro will be a variant of RH maintained Systemd/Linux anyways, so the market analysts has no reason to fret...
I've been a Linux developer for just over 20 years and I happen to hate Ubuntu. It's similar to how Slackware was in 1994 when I got started. Even the basic stuff requires tweaking to get working properly. In those days, that is how Linux was and we were all hobbyists enthusiastic about fixing problems. For example, burning a CD didn't work on the last Ubuntu system I used a few years ago. That is basic stuff that has worked the same way for 10+ years that no distribution should screw up. Other basic things were jacked on the system; it had an overall feel of a sloppy product. Ubuntu might be fun to play with, I guess, but it's not great for serious work.
Strange as it may seem, Fedora is both bleeding edge and stable. They get some of the complex stuff wrong at first but the basic stuff always works right. (systemd when it premiered was a bumpy ride, for example.) To me Fedora is an appropriate choice for both work and home.
For servers I would never use Ubuntu. We had one Unbuntu server that was installed before I started working at my current employer and things didn't work right, just as I described. It was buggy and nonstandard. We learned from that mistake and only use CentOS and Red Hat (although it's a shame that they dropped 32-bit support---CentOS is a great platform for embedded systems where the switch to 64 bit is far from complete.)
I won't completely trash Ubuntu. They have the best bug tracker online and I frequently see fixes for various things posted prominently on the Ubuntu forums. For example, the Unbuntu forums have been helpful in porting the VMWare 8 modules to the current Fedora kernel so I haven't had to upgrade to VMWare 10. The Ubuntu forums were also helpful recently in working around a bug with my laptop's Intel video chipset.
*YAWN*
Obvious troll, but lol at Xcode being a compiler. Yeah this is the guy us developers should be listening to. Come back when you learn what a compiler is.
He says that he had MyCleanPC "fix all of my problems", but he's still dying from cancer. Talk about getting one's priorities straight!
Ezekiel 23:20
Please, please don't give Red Hat employees any ideas, the last thing we need are people like Poettering and Sievers to start meddling with Postgres or another of the software jewels which are in wide use on Linux servers (on the other hand, these two developers seem to prefer replacing old but solid elements of Linux with their new, incomprehensible and undocumented stuff, so I shouldn't worry too much.).
From the summary:
"Ask her developers what they prefer, however, and it's Ubuntu"
"Given that developers are the new kingmakers"
The whole point was that developers influence the choice of distro on the server, based on their preference for a development distro. I'm not quite sure how you missed that.
The whole point was that developers influence the choice of distro on the server
There must be cases where this is true. However, it's really unclear to me why most developers would care and why they would feel themselves qualified if they have competent sysadmins to work with.
When I've got my sysadmin hat on, most of the developers I work with are developing on Macs. They have no hangups about their code being deployed on EL systems in a big data center. Nobody is clamoring for a shelf full of MacPro tubes to deploy on.
When I've got my developer hat on, I usually write on a Fedora machine. But I'm not daft enough to try to run Fedora on a server and have to worry about the maintenance cycle. I put my configs in a puppet module that pushes the code out to whichever VM I'm going to run it on, regardless of the OS, hypervisor, hardware, or country that code is bound for.
If my code doesn't run on a particular distro, then my code is probably broken (or my devops is hosed).
Maybe there are some startups with a bunch of kids and one third-careeer CEO and they all tell him what's going to happen. Good for them, I guess. Someday a sysadmin might come in and help them fix their stack. Let's not speak of the failwhale.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Only if you have some really fucking weird asscheeks.
Here's one example: how do you track packages? If every developer in your company is using apt (well, or brew for those Mac people, but let's ignore them because the server is NOT going to be a Mac), then it makes sense to compile a list of apt packages right? So then when you go to deploy the sysadmin just has to sudo apt-get those packages.
But if you're server runs Red Hat, somebody has to translate that list of apt packages to yum packages. Not a huge deal, but why would you want headaches like that, even if they are minor, when nothing prevents you from having the same distro on all machines involved?
Another thing to consider is debugging. As a developer, you want to debug on a system that's as close as possible to the machine where the bug occurred. Obviously it's easier to be sure that your environment is the same as your server's (and that you're seeing the same problem the server saw) if the two run the same distro.
I work at a large university. IT gave us two options for operating systems on our servers, Redhat or Windows. They also offer a DIY vmware setup. Rather than having IT manage our servers, I have to do it just so we can run Ubuntu. It is impossible to run certain packages like OpenCPU on Redhat because no one ever bothered to port it. Before you jump to the conclusion that linux is linux, it's really not. You can blame Ubuntu for going off the beaten path or Redhat for not keeping up with the times but some software packages only run on one linux distro without considerable effort. Conversely, the only supported backup solution for our servers is IBM tivoli crap and I went through hell to convert the rpm based installer into something that would work on Ubuntu LTS. IBM doesn't get that Ubuntu (or debian derived) distros are popular now either.
As a *BSD guy, I find both Ubuntu and Redhat irritating but at least ubuntu has apt-get. Funny thing is I started on Redhat 5.0 in '99 or so as my first *nix like os. Back then they had a desktop that didn't suck though.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It's very hard to avoid a snarky response, but I'll try.
* Developers are not kingmakers
* Developers are not system administrators
* Developers don't understand operations
* Developers often don't understand scale engineering unless they can abstract it away by not thinking too hard about anything
* Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and its derivatives) are not intended to be shiny new, but to be reliable
* Use Fedora if you want bleeding edge, or re-package things yourself. RPMs aren't hard.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
That's not how I see it. The admin determines what distro is used by the company. The developer has to comply with the company standard. Not the other way around.
Another thing to consider is debugging. As a developer, you want to debug on a system that's as close as possible to the machine where the bug occurred. Obviously it's easier to be sure that your environment is the same as your server's (and that you're seeing the same problem the server saw) if the two run the same distro.
Two words: virtual machine
Even if you were to run the same OS and version on your primary desktop as your server has, you're still VERY likely to end up installing stuff that the server does not have (ex. maybe you want to use eclipse and the latest JDK for it, or you need a newer version of python for some VCS tool you use). In any case, you are better off running the code on a vm that is very similar to production.
RH should have been worried about that like 17 years ago when I switched to Debian because they were messing up. Now I frankly do not care.
I am a bit of loss, why all this spam about MyCleanPC in several threads?
Well, it's a good thing we all live in the world exactly as you see it, and not, you know, in reality.
Right, but you're missing the point: why would you want to hassle with virtual machines just to support two distros, when you can share one distro between both and avoid the extra work?
Why do devs choose Ubuntu over Linux? (Ok, I'm baiting, but really why do they choose it?)
RedHat does have MySQL, so some of the presumptions of the post are false. True, RedHat now is moving into MariaDB a MySQL branch currently, fork in the future. But RedHat is a great choice for developers. What about Tomcat or JBoss? Their long support window and awesome packaging makes a great choice for risk-averse organization. I see lots of orgs adopting these app servers supported by RedHat.
I see it as a difference in startups and other businesses (those other businesses being shooting stars, cash cows, dogs, etc.). Startups _need_ to produce something fast, but it doesn't have to be maintainable, strongly supported, etc.
Gotta go, but keep in mind some of the assumptions here...
Isn't RHDE Called Fedora?
Because Red Hat just works? Somewhere along the line I was surprised that ubuntu got popular because there so much controversy with it. Maybe it's a generational thing, as Red Hat feels like Unix and Ubuntu feels like Windows.
And besides, once you have gcc and vi or emacs, what more does a developer need?
Sure sounds like an issue with you.
Many tens, hundreds, millions? Use Ubuntu just fine.
I install Ubuntu LTS, configure it, install my packages, install my apps, and monitor my app logs. Never once have I had the OS be an issue..
This should be true of any modern distro with a stable branch (Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu LTS, etc.)
If not, you're certainly doing something wrong.
Linux is not UNIX. It never was, and certainly never will be.
And besides, once you have gcc and vi or emacs, what more does a developer need?
PyCharm (ie. IntelliJ), Chrome, a music program (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) a chat program (Pidgin, Hipchat, etc.), GIMP for image manipulation ...
I have no beef with the emacs/vi folks, but some of us think that development technology (like every other kind of technology) has advanced since the 80's, and we want an OS that looks like it's from this decade to run it on.
This proposition from the mind of Matt Asay has me puzzled. Since when is any one company expected to produce everything. Red Hat does best what Red Hat does, which is produce a world-class industrial strength platform - good enough for Oracle to steal outright. To try and cover all these other solutions would be to spread their effort a little too thinly. There may be as yet, a business oppertunity for some down-stream company to do just as Asay suggests.
"Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Delivered and supported by Red Hat. CIOs like that story", Matt Asay March 2009
I used to use AIX. Was a trained AIX admin. Haven't used one since very early 90's.
You mean where management ignores the sysadmin and developer's requests and says you're using this because we paid for it.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Operating System - Depends on the use case
Database - Oracle - and what does Oracle prefer it run on? Linux or Solaris
Web Server - Apache HTTPD beats IIS anyday
Server OS? What kind of server? Solaris, AIX, Free/Net/OpenBSD, and IRIX beat Windows anyday.
Compiler? The one that's for the platform you're running. ICC on Intel, SunStudio, MIPSPro, etc. And XCode isn't a compiler - it's an IDE. The compiler is either GCC or LLVM
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I started on RedHat, because it was the major distro at the time. Then because of the controversial RHEL/Fedora split, I switched to Slackware. The RHEL/Fedora split was a non-issue, but once I tried Slackware, I realized it was so much better, I never went back to Redhat.
My friend went to Gentoo around the same time. He never wanted to go back to Redhat either, for similar reasons.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Run some oddball Ubuntu I use as a desktop for my server environment? WTF for? Am I going to log in and use a desktop or something? I'd rather the server run a solid server configuration.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Unless you pay for RH, you cannot use RH anymore. WTF?!? I used to download RH ISOs and experiment with them. I cannot do that anymore. You break the input, you will lose down the road. I don't understand why "we" (as in the public) can no longer download the RH ISOs and install.
Redhat has some hot stuff being developed, look at GlusterFS for instance.
Red Hat sells operating systems not development tools. The big initiative for RedHat is designing a cloud based operating system which is open and at the same time supports containers -- OpenStack and Docker. They are a major leader in the DevOps approach. But even in development JBoss is a huge suite of development tools.
In terms of the complaints regarding OSes. RedHat is fine with Developers using Ubuntu for their workstations. They are getting to need something to deploy in production on and that's not going to be Ubuntu most of the time. As far as MySQL, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL they've never been a database company but they support all 3 databases. And in terms of Mongo / Cassandra / Hadoop there is no question they are far far ahead of Ubuntu in terms of deployment technology.
The summary is ridiculous. The article linked is more balanced and mainly advice for RedHat doing partnerships / distribution deals.
I didn't see this article until 200+ comments were posted, so no one will ever read this, but Red Hat has got to stop ruining things. I tried to install Fedora 20, and it would not install, even in safe mode with no graphics. Fedora has been an unstable, broken mess since about 18. It's not usable. Stop breaking things. I can understand an experimental OS, sure, but breaking things that already work means people won't use your mess. Gnome 3 was designed by people who have no idea how anyone uses virtual desktops to separate work by topics. Get rid of these clueless people and understand how computer users use desktop environments.
About the only thing you can't blame on Red Hat is FireFox, which is suffering from a lot of the same problems of creating a mess.
Most, if not all, of the open-source technologies mentioned are portable across multiple platforms, not just Red Hat, but also the hated Windows. So what's the big deal that Red Hat is not producing them?
To both of your points, both people not both points (sometimes I hate english :) ), Fedora is in the midst of trying to create something compelling. Specifically, a developer-focused desktop/distro/product called "Fedora Workstation." See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/... and come join us in making an environment that is targeted to developers and really tries to focus on developer needs rather than common users.
Given their primary customers are corporate, the only people with "skin in the game" to develop are corporate IT groups. This is a central consideration you make in marketing and business planning BEFORE you commit to the plan because it's pretty central to your success. They went for the "easy money" of IT and now the pigeons have come home to roost. Their bad now.
This is where a "Sadly True" mode would be helpful.
Why the heck should RH get relevant?
They own and develop 3/4 of the userbase and the kernel and are cash-propelled by the US army.
Developers should be aware of Red Hat, not the other way out. Because if RH dies, the linux community may become free or get strangled by Intel, HP and Oracle.
This is not a real option anymore for a non-hobby systems, as the systemd transition breaks the system in new ways at least once a week. It is not so nice, if a laptop power manager stops displaying battery status, backlight keys stop working, system does not hibernate/suspend/shutdown, etc. I did use a Debian testing for a few years, as it was more stable than many other distro's stable version, but the quality requirements in Debian have plummeteted recently. What is more frightening is readin bug reports where maintainer of a package just says that "this complete breakage may be fixed before release, or may not, but we're not going back to older version anyway."