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--- moving_from_rhel_to_centos_or_oracle_linux [2020/05/22 17:41] – sgriggs
+++ moving_from_rhel_to_centos_or_oracle_linux [2020/05/27 17:05] – [Disclaimer] sgriggs
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+==== Disclaimer ====
+This article should be considered an opinionated editorial rather than any type of unbiased review. As a potential Red Hat refugee, it'll give you a lot of useful info. However, It's not supposed to be an impartial product review of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The author's opinions are merely his own views. There is little love lost for Red Hat here. Let me say that I love Linux but do not like Red Hat due to overwhelmingly bad experiences with their business practices, technical decisions, and product feedback cycle. That alone severely inhibits any impartiality.
 ==== Moving from Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to CentOS or Oracle Enterprise Linux ====
@@ Line 10: / Line 14: @@
   - Red Hat requires every install have a subscription no matter what it's used for (dev, test, UAT, doesn't matter)
-  - Red Hat charges too much money for support. They will charge you $300 for a subscription to Red Hat and can't even call their support at that level. You just get "maybe we will respond if it's convenient" email support from their offshore teams. It's not worth $30 much less $300 and customers feel squeezed.
+  - Many believe Red Hat charges too much money for support. At this time, they will charge you $300 for a subscription to Red Hat and one can't even call their support at that level. You'll probably get "maybe we will respond if it's convenient" email support from their offshore teams. It's my opinion that level of support is not worth $30 much less $300 and customers feel squeezed.
-  - Many of the useful and interesting features such as clustering, glusterfs, and virtualization have been broken into separate and expensive layered products. This defeats some of the reason to run Linux in the first place, turning it into an expensive walled garden.
+  - Many of the useful and interesting features such as clustering, glusterfs, and virtualization have been broken into separate and expensive layered products. Most sysadmins feel this defeats some of the reason to run Linux in the first place, turning it into an expensive walled garden.
-  - Red Hat's kernel patches require a reboot. Oracle Linux with ksplice doesn't have this issue (but it's a for profit feature in OEL, just FYI).
+  - Red Hat's kernel patches require a reboot. Oracle Linux with ksplice doesn't have this issue (but it's a pay-only $$$ feature in OEL, just FYI).
-  - Red Hat began the move to Lennart Pottering's Systemd init replacement. For some, that move has been a painful disaster that has made administration more difficult and application management more problematic. For many, the move was unacceptable.
+  - Red Hat began the move to Lennart Pottering's Systemd init replacement. For some, that move has been a painful disaster that has made administration more difficult, driven complexity up, and forced application management into problematic directions. For many, the move was an unacceptable move backwards.
   - Some customers dislike Red Hat's update schedule, considering it to be overly frequent and aggressive.
-  - Patches and even trivial packages aren't available unless your subscription is up to date. If not, you have a partially broken system.
+  - Patches and even trivial packages aren't available unless your subscription is up to date. If not, you have a partially broken system because you can't install even simple things like timezone updates or small unix CLI tools.
-  - Red Hat sales people tend to aggressively threaten and browbeat their customers rather than working with them on balancing entitlements.
+  - Red Hat sales people have been known to act in ways customers can feel is too aggressive.
-  - Red Hat training is very dubious and scammy. They make up tests with "gotcha" questions that you'll only learn if you take their $2500 - $3000 dollar classes, but those factoids are only to keep knowledgeable sysadmins from passing their $250 test without paying the trollbridge fee for the classes.
+  - Some consider Red Hat training practices to be overly monotized. For example, it appears very likely that they make up their RHCE and RHCSA tests with "gotcha" questions that you'll only learn if you take their $2500 - $3000 dollar classes, but those factoids are only to keep regular knowledgeable sysadmins (who learned from on-job-training) from passing their $250 test without paying the trollbridge fee for the classes.
-  - Red Hat has been bought by IBM who has begun the process of strip mining the company and moving everything they can offshore. Quality is dropping.
+  - Red Hat has been bought by IBM who appears to have begun the process of strip mining the company and moving everything they can offshore. Many feel quality is dropping.
-  - Red Hat has a history of making poor technical choices. Example: they eschewed XFS and badmouthed it for years refusing to support it, then started using it as the default in RHEL7 enigmatically. Now they cheerlead for it.
+  - Much criticism has been directed at Red Hat for making poor technical choices. Example: they eschewed XFS and badmouthed XFS for years refusing to support it, then started using it as the **default** in RHEL7 enigmatically. Now they applaud it.
-  - RHEL follows Fedora and bad decisions in Fedora (of which therea are MANY) filter into RHEL eventually. The history of this happening in the past has definitely put some customers off and made them gunshy about upgrades.
+  - RHEL follows Fedora and thus any bad decisions in Fedora (and most sysadmins would never choose a desktop distro like Fedora that has a long history of controversial decisions) filter into RHEL eventually. Fedora are the folks who pushed first on "great" ideas like: systemd, dbus, XML config files, udev, python scripts instead of C-based tools, GNOME3, etc...
   - Red Hat isn't excited about BTRFS because the main developer works at Oracle. This could lead to more stagnation with Red Hat's already stagnant choices for filesystems. It's missing inline compression and deduplication without either BTRFS, ZFS-on-Linux, or ReiserFS v4.x.