Enterprise Linux on desktop?

anders@rytter.me to Linux@lemmy.ml – 55 points –

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

65

You are viewing a single comment

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.

Sort of

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

Red Hat was also a non-starter because of the lack of gaming functionality.

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.

TIL about Fedora, last I knew it was a rolling bleeding edge OS. Clearly lots of movement in the Red Hat camp.

As for gaming, drivers were not the problem for me. Getting games to run with ease was. On OpenSUSE, I just install Steam, enable Proton and basically go at that point. Red Hat was non-trivial to do this. Could be a skill issue, but I had a better time getting going with OpenSUSE TW.

Fedora has been a thing since 2003, released alongside Red Hat Enterprise Linux after Red Hat Linux was discontinued. The gaming issues sound interesting, though. Did you have steam installed through rpmfusion, flatpak, or something else?

Sorry I meant TIL about it being considered stable, haha. I've known about Fedora because I used it when it was meant to replace the free Red Hat Linux.

As for Steam, I don't recall how I installed it, sorry! I just recall significant grief getting it going (again, perhaps a skill issue) but had no big roadblocks using OpenSUSE.

@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

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:

  • both are released as daily snapshots, that were only auto tested
  • those snapshots are frozen before an update and tested further
  • then they're released as a new minor/major version

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

5 more...
5 more...