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.

@linux

  • NaNEnglish
    6•4 months ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      5•4 months ago

      You can use btrfs with any distro. It’s just easier to install on some than others. Ubuntu and Mint will automatically create subvolumes for root and home if you install on a btrfs partition. With Debian, you have to manually create and mount all of the subvolumes before starting the installation.

          • @[email protected]
            1•4 months ago

            It was available as a technology preview in RHEL 6 and 7, but dropped in 8. There apparently wasn’t much demand for it, and the reputation of BTRFS isn’t exactly synonymous with the image of reliability Red Hat strives for. There’s also the idea of maintenance and support burdens, and Red Hat themselves have launched their own stab at a fs with an integrated volume manager called Stratisd, though IBM supposedly absorbed the team that was working on it for their own products.

            • NaNEnglish
              1•4 months ago

              Just in time for Fedora to use it by default and create some interest. I get the maintenance burden though, RHEL patches their kernel like crazy. They still use XFS as default which I think is pretty unique at this point.

          • @[email protected]
            1•4 months ago

            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.

      • @[email protected]
        2•4 months ago

        You can’t really use it with redhat. You can swap the kernel and install the user space tools, but then you won’t get support from redhat.

        • @Shareni
          0•4 months ago

          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.