Enterprise Linux on desktop?
Anyone using enterprise Linux on their desktop such as RHEL, Alma, Rocky, CentOS etc.?
I'm curious if it's easy to use for this purpose or if the older packages are a pain.
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Enterprise Linux on desktop?
Anyone using enterprise Linux on their desktop such as RHEL, Alma, Rocky, CentOS etc.?
I'm curious if it's easy to use for this purpose or if the older packages are a pain.
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zenharbinger
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •I used Rocky 9 at home for a while. I think I had an emergency with a disk and had to install fedora because it's all I had. I also use Rocky 8 workstations at work without any problem.
I could easily slip back to Rocky over Fedora no problem. But I don't game or do anything except serve ipa.
Edit: and yes these were/are my daily driver desktops.
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Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to zenharbinger • •Okay cool. I don't game so for me that's not a problem neither if games don't work.
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ulterno
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •RHEL at work.
Not having
KateorOkularis a pain.Need to download
cmakefor certain cases.Subscription Manager is a pain.
Air gap means I can't make do with
snaps.I would also gripe about not having KDE, but that would be unfair and off topic in this case.
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Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to ulterno • •@ulterno
For which cases did you need cake for example?
My base OS is Fedora Kinoite and I'm considering have AlmaLinux in a podman container for some applications and tools. Replacing it every year because fedora is eol is too often in my opinion.
Hasn't Kate been replaced by an upgraded Kwrite or is Kate still maintained?
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ulterno
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Since you asked, I don't usually need cake, since I don't do parties, but I might occasionally buy a piece and eat it.
kateandkwriteare both maintained and usable side by side on the same system.In terms of features...
kwrite:kate::notepad:notepad++. Kinda...kwriteis still much more featurefull thannotepad.They have KDE Frameworks dependencies, which makes it non-trivial to install on RHEL when you can only access the local base and EPEL repo.
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Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to ulterno • •@ulterno
Haha. Typo. I meant cmake 😂
Ah i see. I think Alma has KDE available
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zenharbinger
in reply to ulterno • • •NaN
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Have. I like btrfs, you only get that with Oracle and they have philosophical issues, but also random brokenness with things like selinux policies.
Old packages aren’t really an issue for me, but missing packages that haven’t been put into EPEL can be a pain. Depends what you want to accomplish or need.
I feel similarly about Fedora’s quick EOL, which was how I got onto an enterprise desktop distro too. The paper cuts are why I ended up switching to Mint.
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cmnybo
in reply to NaN • • •Virulent
in reply to cmnybo • • •Shareni
in reply to Virulent • • •Is anyone here using RHEL support, and is also able to mess around with their partitions?
The free licences are unsupported, and I doubt people are dropping $300+ for RHEL every few for their personal desktop.
jollyrogue
in reply to cmnybo • • •Skull giver
in reply to jollyrogue • • •biribiri11
in reply to Skull giver • • •NaN
in reply to biribiri11 • • •jollyrogue
in reply to Skull giver • • •They don’t have any devs to support it. The one dev who an idea about btrfs left for Oracle, from what I’ve read.
Btrfs is rather nice in the correct scenarios, and lack of btrfs is one reason I’m moving away from CentOS servers.
Pantherina
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •I looked at RHEL pricing but damn hell no.
The rest is even more outdated than Debian, so just use Debian.
In general stable Desktops are not enjoyable. You will basically not want to read Linux News anymore as you wont be getting any of that.
Its good for enterprises, where policies dont need to change etc. Also in combination with Flatpak and EPEL it may work somehow, but its just worse than using some normal Distro I heard.
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Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to Pantherina • •@Pantherina
There is a free subscription for RHEL for individuals.
And I think it's less of an issue nowadays with old packages since we have extra layers such as podman containers over distrobox, flatpak, snap, Nix etc.
Then you can have a solid base OS with less solid layers on top where things are allowed to break but don't mess with the rest of the system. I use Fedora Kinoite as my base for this exact reason.
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Pantherina
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Interesting, didnt know that.
Snaps are only somewhat secure on Ubuntu, at least to my state of knowledge. Only on Ubuntu do they have the Apparmor profiles to isolate apps.
I think Fedora Atomic is just better for most cases. KDE got their stuff together mostly (I will not want to use a stable version until 6.3 or something) and the rest of Fedora never breaks for me.
pearsaltchocolatebar
in reply to Pantherina • • •Shareni
in reply to pearsaltchocolatebar • • •You're more out of date than RHEL. Centos was killed off in 2020, stream is upstream.
RHEL with the free licence is RHEL without support.
GnomeComedy
in reply to pearsaltchocolatebar • • •pearsaltchocolatebar
in reply to GnomeComedy • • •Shareni
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •I'm currently running MX + nix unstable. Debian's not enterprise, but it's close enough.
There are some things that are pretty hard to handle. For example large DEs like KDE, or Nvidia proprietary drivers. I wouldn't even try to handle them through nix.
Besides that, you'll also have to deal with the issues the other PM might have. For example flatpak and outdated system libraries (flatpak doesn't provide them). Nix doesn't have that issue because it provides everything, but it uses more disk space, and you have to deal with nix docs.
In the end it really depends on your needs, and only trying it out will tell you for sure. If you're a gamer with the newest hardware, you're probably not going to have fun. If you need it for work, it'll be great if you can deal with an external PM. If you need it as a media device, slap on a few flatpaks and it's perfect.
For me, this approach is far better than using a rolling distro, and I might try out RHEL at
... show moreI'm currently running MX + nix unstable. Debian's not enterprise, but it's close enough.
There are some things that are pretty hard to handle. For example large DEs like KDE, or Nvidia proprietary drivers. I wouldn't even try to handle them through nix.
Besides that, you'll also have to deal with the issues the other PM might have. For example flatpak and outdated system libraries (flatpak doesn't provide them). Nix doesn't have that issue because it provides everything, but it uses more disk space, and you have to deal with nix docs.
In the end it really depends on your needs, and only trying it out will tell you for sure. If you're a gamer with the newest hardware, you're probably not going to have fun. If you need it for work, it'll be great if you can deal with an external PM. If you need it as a media device, slap on a few flatpaks and it's perfect.
For me, this approach is far better than using a rolling distro, and I might try out RHEL at some point just out of curiosity. Unlike Arch, Debian will always boot, but I still have the newest docker instead of the one that was deprecated 3 months ago and won't be updated for at least a year. Also, home-maanger makes it a breeze to make a list of packages and have them installed wherever and whenever.
Also, Centos is gone, stream is upstream so it's a testing ground for RHEL instead of a RHEL repack. I wouldn't go with the bootleg RHELs, that's just asking for trouble if they haven't switched to upstream as well.
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Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to Shareni • •With bootleg RHELs you mean Alma and Rocky?
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Shareni
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Yeah. They used to be RHEL derivatives, but now they're either upstream (Alma) or a mix of legally dubious sources and upstream (Rocky).
They can't be as stable, and 16 free RHEL licences is more than enough for personal or small business use.
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in reply to Shareni • •Linux reshared this.
spaghetti_carbanana
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Sort of, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I started on OpenSUSE Leap but had issues getting things like GPU and Steam working. Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.
TW works great for gaming and the enterprise features I care about (like domain joining) work out of the box. Its certainly harder to set up than something more geared towards home use (typically one of the various the downstreams of Debian or Arch) but that doesn't bother me.
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Shareni
in reply to spaghetti_carbanana • • •Not even close
Fedora Rawhide (?) == Opensuse TW
Fedora == Opensuse leap
RHEL == Suse enterprise
The higher ones are a testing ground for the one below, until you get to the actual product, the enterprise distros. They have completely different priorities
Unless you're running bleeding edge hardware, you can install the drivers just fine. Enterprise users also need GPUs. Flatpak solves steam in most cases.
NaN
in reply to Shareni • • •Shareni
in reply to NaN • • •How SUSE builds its Enterprise Linux distribution - PART 5 | SUSE Communities
Vincent Moutoussamy (SUSE)NaN
in reply to Shareni • • •A Tumbleweed snapshot is very different than Fedora though. They are created automatically, sometimes daily, based on the activity in Factory and the result of automated testing, so any snapshot from there is essentially a snapshot of factory where the main development happens. Fedora has much more work before it is made a release.
Leap uses SUSE Enterprise binaries now, it’s part of the closing the gap they mentioned towards the end and it did end up implemented in SP3. The package hub is community packages from openSUSE. SUSE and openSUSE have a very different and much more collaborative process.
Shareni
in reply to NaN • • •Isn't the rawhide -> branched -> stable process similar?
Rawhide is also rolling with daily updates, it gets frozen before a release (branched) and tested, and then branched is released as stable.
TW is rolling, it gets frozen before a release and tested, and then that snapshot is released.
They're both using OpenQA to run automated tests before releasing the snapshot for the day.
Nice, that's good to know.
Yeah, I'm starting to get that. It looks really nice for both corporate and personal interests.
BCsven
in reply to Shareni • • •Secunergy 🐧
in reply to Shareni • • •Not sure this comparison is correct
Fedora rather corresponds to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing
Fedora Rawhide is very experimental, OpenSUSE once had a testing version, couldn’t find it now on the download page
Shareni
in reply to Secunergy 🐧 • • •Yeah, I learned more about their lifecycles due to this thread.
I think you're correct as far as usability is concerned, but they've got a lot of similarities:
The comparison really breaks with leap and sel. While fedora is directly upstream of rhel, both sel and leap are downstream from TW, and leap also has sel packages and so it's also downstream from it. But I think my point still sort of stands because it seems like they mainly implemented that to get additional testing for sel packages.
Usability and stability wise, a better comparison would be: fedora:tw -> centos:leap -> rhel:sel
GnomeComedy
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •I run RHEL on my personal desktop and laptop. Why? Because I use it at work and the more I use it the better I understand it. This benefits me both at home and at work. I've even built Ansible roles and playbooks in git to setup my home machines. Overkill? Sure, but I have great peace if mind if I lose a boot drive that I'll be right back to normal quickly.
You can absolutely use an enterprise distro at home. Ignore the trolls about "It's all too old" or "it doesn't have X software". I don't care what version vim, GNOME or pretty much anything is, as long as I can open the core tools I need. For "missing" software: I've yet to find any software I "need" that I haven't figured out how to install (again: Ansible-d) including Flatpak for all the normie stuff (spotify, slack, discord, etc) and I'm golden.
My $0.02
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d3Xt3r
in reply to GnomeComedy • • •It's not trolling. There's a very legitimate reason to use a distro with new packages and that is hardware compatibility - especially if you're on a recent laptop, and you want all features working such as WiFi, flawless suspend and resume without battery drain or crashes, working Fn keys, or you want to make use of all the power management features in your processor (eg see all the recent AMD p-state driver advancements).
Newer packages (specifically: the kernel and mesa/vulkan stack) are also important for those who are gamers, as several performance improvements, bug fixes and compatibility fixes are made with each new release. For instance, just take a look at these performance benefits of the new ntsync driver:
Finally, ev
... show moreIt's not trolling. There's a very legitimate reason to use a distro with new packages and that is hardware compatibility - especially if you're on a recent laptop, and you want all features working such as WiFi, flawless suspend and resume without battery drain or crashes, working Fn keys, or you want to make use of all the power management features in your processor (eg see all the recent AMD p-state driver advancements).
Newer packages (specifically: the kernel and mesa/vulkan stack) are also important for those who are gamers, as several performance improvements, bug fixes and compatibility fixes are made with each new release. For instance, just take a look at these performance benefits of the new ntsync driver:
Finally, even productivity users who don't care about gaming can benefit from recent system packages - consider all the recent improvements in filesystem drivers such as btrfs and ntfs3, and the addition of the new bcachefs driver with kernel 6.7 which is a godsend for anyone running a tiered storage setup.
Also, the entire Linux community has been buzzing with the release of KDE 6 - just take a look at all the new features and improvements - such as much better Wayland support with tons of bug fixes, HDR, ICC profiles for individual monitors, color blindless correction filters for making the desktop experience better for people with protanopia/deuteranopia/tritanopia... there are some very legitimate improvements and use-cases here. How can you just wave all this off as trolling?!
So just because a distro with old packages suits your needs, doesn't mean that everyone else is trolling. There are legit good reasons why many home users prefer leading-edge distros like Fedora, Arch, Tumbleweed etc.
cc: @anders@rytter.me
KDE MegaRelease 6
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in reply to GnomeComedy • • •Anders Rytter Hansen likes this.
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in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Anders Rytter Hansen likes this.
LeFantome
in reply to Pacmanlives • • •Distrobox on Debian Stable?
For a while, I have been thinking of trying Arch via Distrobox on Debian Stable. Feels like it would be the best of both worlds.
egg82
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Rocky 9 as my daily driver on both desktop and laptop, yeah. Ever since starting my current job a couple years ago, where we use RHEL everywhere from servers to desktops I just started switching my entire homelab to Rocky.
Personally it's perfectly fine. Not as flashy or glamorous as Pop OS (which is definitely a fun choice) but I like the stability. I need my computer to be secure and also just work so I can use it to do what I need or want to do.
Still have Steam, Discord, FF, Thunderbird, YTMDA, etc all running just fine on it, though I normally stream from my Windows PC when I'm using it for gaming.
As a sysadmin and developer, I prefer Linux as my daily to Windows (hey, this was a surprise to me, anyway), and from that list I prefer Rocky over others currently. Maybe one day that'll change, but I don't see me moving any time soon.
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Possibly linux
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to Possibly linux • •What do you mean with other way around?
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Possibly linux
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •Anders Rytter Hansen
in reply to Possibly linux • •And then enterprise Linux on your home desktop?
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jollyrogue
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •It can be done, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Containers and VMs running a stable distro on top of something like Fedora, Tumbleweed, or whatever else is my preferred setup.
Something like Fedora also has a more mature in-place upgrade ability than the EL distros have.
Shareni
in reply to jollyrogue • • •Just why?
RHEL gets a new version every 5 years, not every 6 months. It's not really relevant since OP has 3 more years before maintenance support starts. By that time a full format is definitely in order.
jollyrogue
in reply to Shareni • • •You answered your own question. Maintaining software will eat up lots of time. It’s fine when there is a team to maintain software for installs, but not really something a single person running a desktop/laptop probably wants to deal with.
The 5yr release cycle is a pain starting about year 3 even for people who get paid to deal with it. 😆
VMs and containers on top of something more up to date is the best of both. Up to date distro with features, and all the distros one could want!
In-place upgrades are very relevant. Who wants to destroy their setup and reinstall everything when a new OS is released?
There is leapp for EL in-place upgrades, but it’s new and rather rough, from my testing.
Flatpak has made software support better, but I’d still recommend something else without a concrete reason, like proprietary CFD software or something which only supports EL.
Shareni
in reply to jollyrogue • • •But you have to do more maintenance the more your system is up to date. I've never had to fix a faulty grub update on a stable distro, but I did on arch.
It really depends on the user. Think of the vast majority of people who use their personal machine only to browse, play media, and occasionally edit text files or spreadsheets. Just having to press a button to update the system and a few flatpaks for a decade is pretty appealing.
I wouldn't try it though...
... show moreI'm currently on mx + nix unstable. It will always boot, and half of all of my installed packages are near the edge. That's what I consider the best of both worlds. No need to take the VM penalty if you don't need to.
But you have to do more maintenance the more your system is up to date. I've never had to fix a faulty grub update on a stable distro, but I did on arch.
It really depends on the user. Think of the vast majority of people who use their personal machine only to browse, play media, and occasionally edit text files or spreadsheets. Just having to press a button to update the system and a few flatpaks for a decade is pretty appealing.
I wouldn't try it though...
I'm currently on mx + nix unstable. It will always boot, and half of all of my installed packages are near the edge. That's what I consider the best of both worlds. No need to take the VM penalty if you don't need to.
It's good for cleanup, and I got used to it in on windows. Even when I did everything manually, the longest I've spent between full reinstalls was 2 years. I literally did it the other day because I was switching back to xfce from kde.
The biggest issue was reinstalling all of the packages I need, but with
home-managerI've made a list. A single command installs all of the packages on it, no matter the distro.Keep your dotfiles in a repo, for safety if nothing else. Then you can resurrect your setup pretty easily.
jollyrogue
in reply to Shareni • • •Arch. There’s the problem. 😆
Fedora and Tumbleweed keep up with Arch while being easier to maintain. Fedora is a semi-rolling release, and Tumbleweed is rolling release. Both are much more stable than Arch is.
Arch is great for people who want to tinker with their desktop/laptop install. I do not, so I run Fedora.
Run Fedora or Tumbleweed. They will be continuously updated, and an install will last years.
Your basis for comparison is Arch which is known to be highly unstable and a handful to maintain. 😆
For my work, I need different OSes and distros for testing. If someone needs a stable distro for something, a VM or container will work. There are ways around the needing a stable.
Also, containers aren’t a penalty.
... show moreYou can break the cycle. Just because some you s
Arch. There’s the problem. 😆
Fedora and Tumbleweed keep up with Arch while being easier to maintain. Fedora is a semi-rolling release, and Tumbleweed is rolling release. Both are much more stable than Arch is.
Arch is great for people who want to tinker with their desktop/laptop install. I do not, so I run Fedora.
Run Fedora or Tumbleweed. They will be continuously updated, and an install will last years.
Your basis for comparison is Arch which is known to be highly unstable and a handful to maintain. 😆
For my work, I need different OSes and distros for testing. If someone needs a stable distro for something, a VM or container will work. There are ways around the needing a stable.
Also, containers aren’t a penalty.
You can break the cycle. Just because some you suffered doesn’t mean others have to. 🙂
Everyone says they’re going to clean up their profiles, but no one does. 😆
I have that because I run through so many test servers and temp installs.
Then there are Ansible playbooks to setup my systems.
Shareni
in reply to jollyrogue • • •They can only dream about keeping up, TW especially from what I've seen, and that just proves my point: arch is harder to maintain because it's more up to date.
Also, I ran fedora for a few weeks after giving up on arch, it failed to boot multiple times after an update, and programs would randomly stop working after a reboot. I somehow had none of those issues on nobara.
It will break more often, and if you only use it to browse you'll still get all the updates you need if you used a stable distro. The only thing you're missing out on is testing the newest version of the DE. I've installed fedora for a friend like that, but I'm pretty sure it was a mistake even though they haven't had any issues so far.
... show moreI need stable because I want my machine always to work. There's no
They can only dream about keeping up, TW especially from what I've seen, and that just proves my point: arch is harder to maintain because it's more up to date.
Also, I ran fedora for a few weeks after giving up on arch, it failed to boot multiple times after an update, and programs would randomly stop working after a reboot. I somehow had none of those issues on nobara.
It will break more often, and if you only use it to browse you'll still get all the updates you need if you used a stable distro. The only thing you're missing out on is testing the newest version of the DE. I've installed fedora for a friend like that, but I'm pretty sure it was a mistake even though they haven't had any issues so far.
I need stable because I want my machine always to work. There's no going around that if you're running rhel on top of fedora, if fedora craps out you're not getting to rhel. Specific compatibility requirements are different story, and I agree with you on that.
My basis is that I've been using linux for close to 20 years, and have tried every popular distro. In that time, only stable distros like debian never crashed or failed to boot.
But you do take a performance penalty when using them...
I literally did it the other day, made a cup of coffee, and finished with both around the same time. The only thing I had to suffer through was waiting for files to transfer to and from an external drive. And I'll survive that easily if it means I'll avoid possible bugs and performance impacts.
Sweet, makes sense really
pastermil
in reply to jollyrogue • • •Strange...
Usually you'd run the more stable distro on the bottom and the more cutting-edge on top, not the other way around.
jollyrogue
in reply to pastermil • • •const_void
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •bloodfart
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •scratchandgame
in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen • • •It doesn't make any sense.
Why staying on old package for unnecessary stability (that stability is for highly "mission critical" things).