It's funny how certain subjects come up sometimes.
A guy I used to work with was over-seas in Jakarta for about 8 years.
He just got back about 3 months ago.
He was telling me that newer versions of specific distro's are hard to get there.
He also says, that even when you can get ahold of them, often the hardware is so
old, that newer distro's won't run on them.
The place he was working hasn't upgraded their Linux versions in almost 10 years.
We got to talking about how Linux has changed over the years. There was a lot he has never used.
systemd vs sysV init.d
systemctl vs chkconfig
firewall-cmd/ufw vs iptables
wayland vs X11
nmcli vs ifcfg scripts
SElinux, setenforce.
udev uuids vs device paths
gsettings registry vs .bash_profile and .bashrc scipts.
Ansible vs puppet/chef
About a million different distro's, and desktop flavors. ( I may be exaggerating 'slightly')
The "cloud" and virtualization, docker, podman, VM's in general.
UEFI vs Legacy BIOS.
Other things that we never got about to discussing.
He said he hates the "new" stuff. Later, he admitted he doesn't hate the new stuff, he just hates learning it.
I remember going through the same process. But for me, I had several years to learn the changes slowly over
a period time. For him, it's all coming at once. I feel for him.
But then the discussion turned to why things change. His old systems were running on the 3.10.x kernel.
I am running on the 5.16.x kernel. A lot has changed in the meantime.
We can blame a lot of this on Ubuntu, Fedora and Redhat. They are the culprits here.
Redhat was the first distro to support built-in clustering, cman, clusterfs, fencing, etc...
They were also the first distro to support NIC teaming, NIC failover redundancy.
They were the first distro to support LVM and software RAID. They were the first distro to incorporate
journaled file-systems. All of this makes sense for a distro that is primarily used in enterprise data centers
that needs maximum uptime and redundancy.
Fedora was the first distro to use systemd, wayland, NetworkManager, pipewire, firewalld, systemctl service
files, and device uuids. There is some debate other whether they were the first distro to support secure boot and UEFI.
We can blame these guys for complicating our lives! It seems that for good or bad, however you feel about it,
many other distro's have incorporated this stuff, and now it seems to be a standard part of most mainstream distro's.
Now as bad as Redhat and Fedora have been for changing the backend of things... Ubuntu has it's share.
Most new desktop environments start out in Ubuntu distro's, Even now they have some desktops other distro's
just don't have, Enlightenment, Deepin, Boas, etc... They were the first distro add proprietary drivers.
nVidia, Radeon, mpg codecs, mp4 codecs. (You could manually download this stuff before that time)
Ubuntu has done a lot for the multimedia/gaming community as well, it seems the earliest versions of Steam, Kodi,
Lutris, and Proton were on Ubuntu desktops. So we can blame Ubuntu for adding all these extra complications
to the frontend.
Sure there are other distro's that have contributed to the mainstream.... but by and large, these are the bad guys!
Note: These are three main distro's I use.
A guy I used to work with was over-seas in Jakarta for about 8 years.
He just got back about 3 months ago.
He was telling me that newer versions of specific distro's are hard to get there.
He also says, that even when you can get ahold of them, often the hardware is so
old, that newer distro's won't run on them.
The place he was working hasn't upgraded their Linux versions in almost 10 years.
We got to talking about how Linux has changed over the years. There was a lot he has never used.
systemd vs sysV init.d
systemctl vs chkconfig
firewall-cmd/ufw vs iptables
wayland vs X11
nmcli vs ifcfg scripts
SElinux, setenforce.
udev uuids vs device paths
gsettings registry vs .bash_profile and .bashrc scipts.
Ansible vs puppet/chef
About a million different distro's, and desktop flavors. ( I may be exaggerating 'slightly')
The "cloud" and virtualization, docker, podman, VM's in general.
UEFI vs Legacy BIOS.
Other things that we never got about to discussing.
He said he hates the "new" stuff. Later, he admitted he doesn't hate the new stuff, he just hates learning it.
I remember going through the same process. But for me, I had several years to learn the changes slowly over
a period time. For him, it's all coming at once. I feel for him.
But then the discussion turned to why things change. His old systems were running on the 3.10.x kernel.
I am running on the 5.16.x kernel. A lot has changed in the meantime.
We can blame a lot of this on Ubuntu, Fedora and Redhat. They are the culprits here.
Redhat was the first distro to support built-in clustering, cman, clusterfs, fencing, etc...
They were also the first distro to support NIC teaming, NIC failover redundancy.
They were the first distro to support LVM and software RAID. They were the first distro to incorporate
journaled file-systems. All of this makes sense for a distro that is primarily used in enterprise data centers
that needs maximum uptime and redundancy.
Fedora was the first distro to use systemd, wayland, NetworkManager, pipewire, firewalld, systemctl service
files, and device uuids. There is some debate other whether they were the first distro to support secure boot and UEFI.
We can blame these guys for complicating our lives! It seems that for good or bad, however you feel about it,
many other distro's have incorporated this stuff, and now it seems to be a standard part of most mainstream distro's.
Now as bad as Redhat and Fedora have been for changing the backend of things... Ubuntu has it's share.
Most new desktop environments start out in Ubuntu distro's, Even now they have some desktops other distro's
just don't have, Enlightenment, Deepin, Boas, etc... They were the first distro add proprietary drivers.
nVidia, Radeon, mpg codecs, mp4 codecs. (You could manually download this stuff before that time)
Ubuntu has done a lot for the multimedia/gaming community as well, it seems the earliest versions of Steam, Kodi,
Lutris, and Proton were on Ubuntu desktops. So we can blame Ubuntu for adding all these extra complications
to the frontend.
Sure there are other distro's that have contributed to the mainstream.... but by and large, these are the bad guys!
Note: These are three main distro's I use.
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