Should You Replace Red Hat, AlmaLinux, or Rocky Linux with Debian?

[@louchitchat]

We already started the testing, waiting for big app vendor to send us official approval to run it on Debian 12

[@IoanEugenStan]

I'm doing devops and manageing 120+ servers. The distribution matters very little IMO. It's main purpose is to run containers. If you're app is running inside a container you don't care about the underlying distribution.

[@miroslavstevic2036]

I've used RedHat since 2003, loved RHEL, but that is over now. In my eyes they are worse then Microsoft. At least Microsft was a legitimate competitor with declared intent to cripple open source community, IBM is a rat and traitor, making money from open source yet hurting and bleeding it. I won't migrate existing servers but I am switching to Debian and FreeBSD for new projects. People who continue using RH are making the "deal with the devil". We need to show strength and unity, we need to show RH they can not hit on Open source without consequences. Migrate people, Debian is Ok, I have some installs from Debian 7, still working 24/7 to this day! Its stable! Sc... y.. RH!

[@DBarks38]

Thank you so much for all these insights Donald! It is a blessing hearing you. Does proxmox which is based on Debian integrate selinux with certified firewall with its vanilla installation already?

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Hi there! I do appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately, I've never played with Proxmox, so I don't know anything about it. So, that might give me something to do before I have to start writing my next book.

[@DBarks38]

It is truly a blessing having such insights from a veteran of the Linux/Unix systems. Proxmox is very popular among research institutes in Europe to deploy cloud solutions. A former colleague in the IT department of the lab were I did my phd was an early adopter of proxmox in 2015… I will always remember him. He was as nice and professional as you are.

[@sdovhfunlahsvisegbakshfjbs4621]

Good to hear an analysis based on the technical and legal reality that many people, including me, can't avoid entirely. The risks and efforts involved in shoving another rug under everything would be significant where I work. I added other distros for automated testing though - just in case. I'm also using Alma and Rocky for my current side project (25 GBit/s firewall/router with optional IDS/IPS). Will try with Debian to see how far it goes, also performance-wise. Since I'm using nftables directly, I can hopefully avoid going down the SELinux rabbit hole. I'd prefer not to change SELinux policies etc. from outside of affected packages. Thanks for the hint. Btw. I can only recommend working directly with nftables for more complex configurations. Compared to working with firewall frontends, it's much easier for me to keep track of things when I maintain chains in files under version control.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Okay, I do appreciate the kind words. Also, I appreciate the tip about using nftables directly for dealing with version control issues. I normally use either firewalld or ufw for production, and never though about their impact on devops. Also, I finally did figure out the problem between SELinux and firewalld on my Debian test machine. It was just a matter of creating a custom policy module, which is way easier than it sounds. I plan to continue with this line of testing, in case anyone out there does need Debian with Red Hat-like security features.

[@treighpedroche1516]

Excellent and fair analysis. Hyper practical and appreciated as always.

[@slalomsk8er397]

I completely forgot about white box Linux. I was using Debian before I switched to CentOS 7 right about when RHEL 8 came out and I was lucky that I didn‘t switch to CentOS 8. Now new servers get setup with Debian again. Only gripe is SSSD is slower and I haven’t yet figured out why but I will figure it out and somebody will figure out the selinux. Could be the community pools together and makes Debian „enterprise ready“.

[@gaiusbaltar7122]

Debian is already enterprise ready.

[@slalomsk8er397]

@@gaiusbaltar7122 I know, I just ordered my first Debian 12 virtual server from our server team ;)

[@MahmoudAbduljawad]

I respect realisim, however, if we just think this way RMS wouldn't have created GNU and Linus wouldn't have created Linux. It is about moving-off RH to help building a competitor ecosystem that is community-driven at core unlike RH which shows no remorse to breaking promises twice within two years, and still pushing those in their payroll to advocate for their unethical stance.

[@stepannovotny4291]

These dramas were a problem during the first round, but the workarounds are already in place these days so I have to wonder whether RedHat is just shooting itself in the foot by pushing more people onto community base versions from the get-go.

[@jonathanbuzzard1376]

It depends on what you are doing, but if you have to support third party commercial software (so that is most of the HPC community which is me) then the work arounds are all useless. We either pay for subscriptions to RHEL with a none existent budget, or a mixture of OpenSUSE LEAP and SLES is going to be the way forward.

[@stepannovotny4291]

The problem I had with RedHat is that they charge ridiculous amounts for their minimal support which essentially includes only a license to run their distro, augmeted by community support on their forum, ie no support.Then you end up with a few RedHat servers under RedHat support, and the rest of your servers running free knock-off distros. That occasionally leads to installation of RedHat RPM's onto knock-off operating systems. Kind of funny now that I'm retired but it wasn't funny at the time.

[@comosaycomosah]

currently trying to decide between alma rocky or oracle (i know i know lol) or Debian for my first major server running on my own prolly gotta go with rhel clone still(already know them but want to get good good so i can get a job like yesterday lol)....btw you're quite relatable my man lol glad i ran across this

[@MAC-RetroCode]

Excellent content ! I would really appreciate hearing your opinion on FreeBSD which “may have” a more permissive license and the necessary stability for production servers?

[@geekoacolyte]

If compliance is not an issue - BSDs are good. I have also experienced less than stellar support for FreeBSD 11 for Dell and HP servers. I am sure that there are compatible ones - but I am not going to chance anything on production environments

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Hi there!. I do appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately, I've had very little experience with FreeBSD, so I don't know that much about it.

[@rawmaterials3909]

I understand your point of view and I get why you think you live in the "real world"... but Im so glad there's plenty of people who are not happy with the "real world" and try to change it.

[@jakobw135]

Isn't the Fedora Linux the FREE version of R.E.L.?

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Not exactly. It's sponsored by the Red Hat company, but it's more an experimental distro to evaluate technologies that Red Hat is considering for inclusion into RHEL. I like it for desktop usage, but I wouldn't use it for a critical-mission server.

[@JeffRyman69]

I can't prove it but I suspect this is coming down from IBM, the parent company of Red Hat. I will note that Red Hat is not violating the GPL by charging a fee for their distribution. They are allowed to get paid for their efforts in that manner. I am not as certain that cancelling the license for distributing the source code you are entitled to is allowed under the GPL, but that remains to be determined in court if anyone questions that. You can be sure that Red Hat's lawyers think it is allowed or at least in a gray enough area to require someone spending a lot of money to go to court about it.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Totally agree.

[@chris_schenkel]

Only a fool would assume otherwise.

[@mrrogers4591]

I don't use firewalld. Just straight to nftables. Why use an interpreter when one can control the firewall directly.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Using nftables directly is certainly an option, if that's what you prefer. The cool part about nftables is that the syntax is a lot easier to learn than the syntax for iptables.

[@MiningForPies]

Pft, I weld logic gates directly on the nic. Don’t use of that software rubbish

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

@@MiningForPies Cool. I'll have to try that myself.

[@kk-linux-rocks7269]

Honestly, for large enterprises who have several hundred and even thousands of servers; coupled with hundreds of RHEL Engineering Workstations across the globe, this whole RHEL thing will likely not bother them one bit. They want the RHEL service agreement and cyber certification + they've got commercial applications that are mission-critical and "certified" for RHEL. The cost and in some cases risk of moving and re-certifying on a different Linux distro isn't worth it to them. The major corporation a good buddy of mine works for isn't budging off of RHEL even after this news from Red Hat. There are even some smaller companies that I know of in the manufacturing space who rely heavily on RHEL and their support agreement and I know they won't be budging either.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Yeah, I hear you. If this whole drama does end up hurting Red Hat, it will be in the long term, and not in the short term. For the long term, we'll have to wait and see what their competitors do.

[@rjmaas]

I am convinced Red Hat will find a way to prevent Alma / Rocky / Oracle Linux to create a 1-to-1 derivative of RHEL without breaking the terms in the RHEL license agreement. So that will create a problem for existing RHEL customers that are running a myriad of dev and test environments. When these non-production environments are running free available RHEL derivatives, they may now need to track these down, start migrating to RHEL, creating additional costs and management overhead. Short term many enterprises may not migrate of RHEL because of this. But longer term, I am not so sure.

[@Grunchy005]

I'm in the midst of switching to Proxmox (debian). All operating systems are merely "application libraries" now.

[@gaiusbaltar7122]

Ubuntu is the most used OS on corporate servers.

[@joaopedroalbernaz]

Ubuntu sucks

[@gaiusbaltar7122]

@@joaopedroalbernaz Red Hat/IBM sucks more...

[@damianateiro]

​@@joaopedroalbernaz As far as I know Canonical is not closing the source code...

[@TheBlueThird]

​@damianateiro But Ubuntu is potentially the same situation as RedHat. There's nothing stopping Canonical from charging fees for their source code. Just because they aren't doing it now doesn't mean that they won't do it in the future.

[@damianateiro]

@@TheBlueThird canonical never did anything similar to this, apart from that logic that would prevent suse or oracle from doing it

[@mountainmanmcbeachfront5296]

Cool stories about history of RHEL and whitehat.. I found that interesting. Nice vid

[@alxkub]

Big corps requiring certification and stuff like that... yeah, they will be better off buying commercial software for that. If Red Hat is going that way, good luck to them. It will have nothing to do with "free" (from "freedom") software though.

[@yosoycubasi]

I don't think so...Debían still using outdated kernel

[@fabricio4794]

Replacing Arch for Debia,are the BEST and Only Choice to Do.......

[@DrBecos]

Actually, partially yes. Do replace them... but go for Slackware if you can.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Ah, yes. Slackware. I've never run it as a server, but I used to run it on a couple of old P4 desktop machines back in the day. It worked well, except that it always took longer to update because most Slackware repositories only provided source code that I had to compile myself. It wasn't hard, it just took longer.

[@DrBecos]

@beginlinuxguru7354 You'll find nothing more stable in the Linux realm. The end of the line. After Slackware, there's only BSD.

[@r.e.434]

awsome! man how did you learn all this?

[@joaopedroalbernaz]

He is the wizard of knowledge, he doesn't learn it anywhere, he is the knowledge. Just look at his beard.

[@esphilee]

He didn’t waste time on shaving, saved for learning.

[@fabienmargerie6815]

Love your work bro.👍😎 See you soon.

[@damianateiro]

I don't understand the mania of using RHEL, that is, if you are not going to pay, for the license there are other much cheaper or free alternatives, the people who use RHEL clones are the same ones who hack the Adobe suite.

[@TS-by9pg]

This is such an excellent video. I hated how people covering this situation seem to just bash RHEL without actually explaining why it exists and what are the needs of RHEL users

[@MiningForPies]

I’m in love with that beard.

[@greenpedal370]

You should replace all distros with Slackware.

[@locatemarbles]

Sounds like growing pains to me. If the will is there, surely those necessary scripts could be implemented in a few years time. Nothing inherently insurmountable.

[@ko95]

great points! thanks for sharing

[@walter_lesaulnier]

My daily driver has been Fedora for over a year and really hope that Red Hat and Evilcorp (IBM) don't pull developers and money from Fedora.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

I hear you. The LXDE spin of Fedora is one of my favorite workstation distros, and I would hate to lose it.

[@laughingvampire7555]

you should replace them with NixOS a reproducible distro, all you need is the configuration.nix file you add all the configuration you want there for all your packages and it will build your entire system, if there is any issue you can revert easily to the previous configuration or you can just test the new package without any risk.

[@steinbauge4591]

u make it sound so easy

[@OM-bs7of]

What about simply using a shell script to install packages in a normal distro m

[@k3dare]

@@OM-bs7of This is the way, with packer for example :)

[@taylorcole6225]

Very nice video with practical info. When it comes to getting support for you OS in the production environment, only Linuxes run by corporations will be supported. Debian 12 is an EXCELLENT OS but if a time critical issue arises which needs quick support, one cannot skim through forums for the same. If people who just want to abandon everything Redhat why use it till now?...Wasnt it alwaz corporation backed?...They were using it bcoz obviously every one wants a SOLID PRODUCT - either paid or free. Debian has been there since 30 yrs. But all big govt agencies, CERN, Fermilab and many others used RHEL or its clones for their most important and critical tasks.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Absolutely correct.

[@ermiyo112]

thought i was watching networkcheck from the future. kekw

[@MarieneBispodeOliveira]

Debian 12 ❤

[@siddhumyl]

I heard about whitebox Linux after decades.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Yeah, I guess I'm showing my age by knowing about it.

[@pschneider1968]

Oracle Enterprise Linux. 'Nough said...

[@buntomat]

The answer is yes.

[@ricardorivaldo]

sure

[@AxelWerner]

Are you the hippy dippy weather man ?

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

I might be hippy dippy, but I don't do much with the weather, though.

[@DrMerciless]

james okeef showed everyone what red hat actually thinks about their core customer base. Now they will have to create a new customer base.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

That's interesting. I like O'keefe, but I haven't seen his videos on that. Now that I know, I'll have to look them up. Many thanks!

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Okay, I finally watched the O'keefe videos, and you're right. They're pretty explosive. It's a shame, because Red Hat used to be a great company, even if it wasn't always perfect. Now though, IBM is ruining Red Hat in every way possible. I find it all very sad.

[@494ihi]

Are not like linux and unix old and there not newer os'es not based linux or some unix . That red hat and ibm - wasn't it quite predictble , talks means nothing for big corp

[@mnoxman]

Point of order. RHEL is IBM. This is clearly a move by the IBM bots.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Point of order accepted.

[@Knirin]

If you want an idea how out of touch the community is with enterprise look how everyone is assuming Rocky and Alma were/are the target of this mess. Shows how little attention they have paid to Oracle in the last few years.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Very true. In fact, Oracle was Red Hat's target when they introduced RHEL 6 and changed the way that they included kernel patches to make it harder for Oracle. (That didn't work so well, though.)

[@TopTierTales-ux4se]

I have replaced Windows with Debian.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

There's definitely nothing wrong with replacing Windows.

[@steinbauge4591]

nah, systemd only

[@richardg.7491]

I get independent devs and hobbyists are hurt by this move, but if you work for a company or otherwise have access to an enterprise license there's no reason to quit red hat.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Yeah, I hear you.

[@bralis2]

Exactly - customer anyways pays for the RHEL license in the end.

[@ollicron7397]

The answer is no, Debian hasn't even updated their website to make it user friendly. Even arch has a friendlier way to get to the ISO. OpenSUSE, Gentoo, Fedora and Arch are better in the home desktop space. Debian is more targeted towards servers not home desktops, yet people advertise it like as if it were for home user desktops when it's not. Even though it can be, Debian is more for the server audience. And Red Hat as you mentioned is much more superior than Ubuntu due to its compatability with SELinux. GPL is for the kernel, the kernel is free and open source, but the distributions that use it dont have to be nor are they required to be. Fedora is an excellent choice and not that far from RedHat. I think it's good for server systems to be for profit because money helps make the product more reliable and stronger. There's also other software out there that's used to harden Linux.

[@harrymason1053]

If you go with Debian, be prepared to have lots of devices not work and you likely have to spend much frustration, time, and effort chasing after drivers.

[@Dante-fk4yi]

Not true! Debian rock solid!

[@taylorcole6225]

Debian is an excellent OS. But people in govt agencies / corporations/ scientific communities all use RHEL and its clones. Because RHEL support is good and when there are time critical issues, one needs a WELL SUPPORTED Linux distro even if it comes from a corporation. Why arent govt agencies/corps/scientific labs like CERN/Fermilab using Debian from the beginning?. Wouldnt they want to save $$ and use another stable distro instead of paid RHEL OR its free clones?..Why choose the RHEL ecosystem whether paid or free?...Bcoz that peace of mind is there that in one way or the other support will be given / issues will be resolved due to a corporation being behind RHEL.

[@ciscornBIG]

Hasn't been my experience at all.

[@MiningForPies]

@@Dante-fk4yiit’s never worked on my 5 year old laptop.

[@cmdrwhiskeygalore3044]

That explains why Raspberry Pi decided to switch over to Debian from Ubuntu

[@GeoStreber]

Huh? I don't think the Raspberry Pi foundation ever offered a Raspi OS based on Ubuntu. It's been Debian since the beginning.

[@zympf]

I recently tried Debian (again), thanks but I will stick with Centos Stream, Fedora and Redhat Developer thanks. I think this issue is all a bit of beat-up motivated by some vague idiology 😀

[@wshyangify]

What's so bad about Debian? Asking for a friend 😉

[@zympf]

@@wshyangify Debian failed to detect my network card, Ubuntu has a different install program to Deb, it found my network card but there was another install problem, sorry forgotten the details. I didn't delve into why, I am sure they were *minor* problems. I am not saying there is anything "bad" about Deb or Ub, but by way of contrast centos, rhel, and fedora use the same install program, and I haven't experienced problems with it. I *am* saying that I believe there is an over-reaction to redhat's actions. Those running a business from recompiling RHEL source code, and not contributing, are not observing the spirit of open source. Worst case as I see it, those non-contributors could re-compile the centos source and then contribute the testing effort OR just hang-back a version. Alternatively they could use the Deb/Ub source code OR fork the rhel source like SUSE have done, but there must be a reason they haven't done that previously right? jus' sayin' 😀

[@chris_schenkel]

If you haven't done it by now then you are part of the problem. Corporate-source is not open source. Get on with it people and leave this sh!t in the dust.