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Review: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
Red Hat's target audience is quite a bit different than that of of most other Linux distributions and this shows in its approach. Most Linux distributions, whether designed with desktop or server environments in mind, tend to aim for providing "more". More features, more capabilities, more conveniences, more desktop environments, more packages, a more modern interface, a more pretty interface, more streamlining/automating of the install experience.
Red Hat is focused almost exclusively on the enterprise market and, perhaps as a side effect, tends to go in the other direction. RHEL 10 ships with relatively few packages, very limited (curated) repositories, just one desktop environment, an entirely vanilla desktop style, very few modern conveniences, and an install process which is at the far end of the spectrum from streamlined. Red Hat appears to be providing "just enough" operating system for other developers and companies to layer their own technologies on top of the distribution.
This makes sense, to a degree, Red Hat wants to support the smallest footprint possible while businesses want something supported and predictable. This makes Red Hat a fairly reasonable distribution for businesses, but as you can imagine, it's a pretty poor substitute for people who want a fully functional operating system for home or small business use. The sort of system you and I might want to run at home is probably vasty different from the one the IT team wants to run on the office servers.
What I felt made less sense was how limited and dated using RHEL 10 felt. It's not that the distribution is a long-term release and the packages are, as expected, six months or so old. I typically like running more conservative platforms, such as Debian, which are not on the cutting edge. What I mean is the distribution seems out of step with the rest of the world, even the rest of the enterprise world, when dealing with some tasks. RHEL is probably the only distribution I have used recently whose install trips over itself if it detects too many wireless networks. It's the only distribution I have used that prompts for registration credentials in at least three different places instead of remembering them. RHEL will, by default, apply updates off-line during the boot process (as Windows does) rather than just installing packages on-line. If the developers were worried about running processes they could detect and offer to restart them (the way openSUSE does) or if they wanted to use atomic updates they could spin off a new snapshot (the way FreeBSD does). Instead the distribution takes the slowest and most awkward approach.
Throughout my trial I kept running into situations where I wondered why Red Hat still feels stuck in the past. Why use LVM and XFS when Btrfs has been around and used in enterprise environments for years? Where are the automated boot environments? Why supply only a Red Hat Flatpak repository with no option to enable Flathub? Why supply only a GNOME on Wayland desktop when a conservative business just interested in getting work done will have a smoother experience with X11? Red Hat seems to feel that a decade of commercial support and two dozen mentions of "AI" in its announcement will be enough for people, but the distribution feels like it's been left behind.