Red Hat Enterprise Linux

RHEL has generally been the server king in Linux server enterprise deployments around the world. It is rock solid and generally considered the standard Linux server distribution.

Red Hat has been my bread and butter for ever! I love Red Hat the company, have pursued employment, have received a certification, and have provided for my family for many, many years supporting RHEL. While CentOS is amazing, sometimes you need the corporate backing, if so, Red Hat support is unrivaled. Stable and reliable, always.

So much meh. I never feel excited installing RHEL. There is always something missing or some dependency issue. It feels more like a chore and less of what I love.

# RHEL RHEL is a rock-solid server distribution with a long 10-year lifecycle with the option to extend another 3 years. I'm going to focus on RHEL 8 for most of this, but I will touch on RHEL 7. ## Server RHEL 8 is the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux based mostly on Fedora 28 with elements from Fedora 29. RHEL adds some new functionality that will make it appeal to developers that want bleeding edge technology and operations teams that expect rock solid stability. RHEL 8 has a different lifecycle for different components of the system, the kernel and some system critical components have a 10-year lifecycle. The other elements, such as python, nodejs, postgresql, and mariadb have their own lifecycle using a technology called application streams. With application streams, you can move applications and their dependencies at their own pace. For example, with NodeJS, RHEL ships with both NodeJS 8 and 10. If you develop an app for NodeJS 8 you can stay on the NodeJS 8 stream until you are ready to start using NodeJS 10 or later version when that is released. With the application streams having their own lifecycle this keeps RHEL fresh with the latest frameworks and runtime. RHEL 8 ships by default with a server management console based on the upstream project cockpit. Cockpit allows administrators to use a graphical interface to interact with the system that won't affect anything you do from the CLI. Cockpit makes it so easy to do basic administration tasks even a Windows Admin could do it! (Sorry I had to poke at my Windows admin friends). RHEL 7 on the server has been one of the best releases of RHEL ever. Not only has it supported customers over the last 5 years in the tried and true manner. RHEL 7 introduced a lot of technologies such as systemd, cockpit, and containers for Red Hat customers. RHEL 7 is also one of the best releases if you needed a stable base but needed a faster application framework and runtime lifecycle. RHEL 7 introduced a packaging method called software collections. It allows users to install different versions of an application runtime like python or nodejs on the same system and you could switch between the versions using bash profile paths. It isn't as robust as application streams in RHEL 8 but it is a great stepping stone to get to where we are now. ## Workstation I've been a user of RHEL workstation for at least 7 years. RHEL is one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions besides Fedora. Across all the supported versions of RHEL it ships with Gnome 3.28 (exception of RHEL 6 which uses Gnome 2.32). RHEL 7 shipped initially with Gnome 3.8 but has slowly upgraded over the last 5 years. RHEL 7 was the first time while using RHEL that I didn't feel like I was missing out on new features on the desktop. The base remained very stable but every even minor release, Gnome was rebased to a more recent version. I am hoping to see the same trend with RHEL 8. RHEL workstation has support for flatpaks. As a result RHEL has no problem with desktop software availability. Flathub and Fedora's Registry gets me the latest software that I use everyday.

I have used CentOS 7 on servers and Fedora on desktop before. But for the first time I went ahead and gave RedHat 8 a try on desktop. I have used this computer for both my office work as well as a personal system. As far as the desktop is considered it's a rock solid distribution. Though RHEL by itself has fairly less number of packages compared to other distributions, I found Flatpak and appimages to have filled most of the gap. Infact I used and loved flatpaks more than I have ever used snaps on Ubuntu. Appstreams are also another awesome addition. But unfortunately after nearly a month of being on RHEL 8, I would be switching to other distro for the moment. Until EPEL 8 is available as some of the packages I need are currently missing (NTFS-3G and networkmanager-openconnect-gnome) and that makes using this as my office computer not completely a smooth experience.