Over the last few months I’ve been contemplating the idea of using Linux as a daily driver. A decade ago while I was in college I was a very heavy user of MacOS and even today still have (and occasionally use) my mid-2010 MacBook Pro that served me through my undergraduate degree. When I began working with two-way radio systems and was supporting codeplug management and physical programming of radios and infrastructure it was much more practical to switch back to Windows on a full time basis due to the general lack of software support for non-Windows systems. Fast forward a few years and since COVID hit, I took my high end desktop home and have been using a repurposed Minix running Red Hat 8 at the office for when I make a rare appearance at the office but I’ve still been playing with the idea of going Linux for majority of things (of course the radio side and some games I play don’t run in Linux and necessitate Windows).
Full Hard Disk
Last week I hit a bit of a stumbling block…the 512 GB SATA SSD that my AMD Ryzen 7 tower was built with became full. So I did what any logical person did, ordered a Samsung 980 PRO NVMe 1 TB drive and reloaded Windows onto it. I didn’t bother removing the old SSD though…so I got to thinking, why not dual boot and daily a Linux distro? So that’s what I decided to do.
Selecting a Distro
I’ve been running Ubuntu at home for a server since 2012. That server actually now is running 20.04 but is beginning to show it’s age (it’s a N54L I bought new in college and aside from Plex, it really only gets used as a file server these days). I used to use Ubuntu and Mint around then on a backup netbook as well (I was having a lot of battery issues with my Mac) so I was quite familiar with the distros. I looked at PopOS as I am heavily contemplating trying a System 76 laptop but over the last few years, I really have been seeing more and more application level issues from the seemingly never-ending amount up updates that are pushed to Debian based systems (such as Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc) and I really only trust them in a production environment when it comes to OSes which are much more tightly regulated such as VyOS (for networking) and 3CX (an SIP PBX).
That left me looking heavily at something from the Fedora base such as Red Hat or CentOS. Over the last few years I’ve pushed nearly every production server I have deployed from Ubuntu to CentOS (and now only run Debian when I need a Debian base for specific applications) as it was traditionally a downstream of Red Hat (which was downstream of Fedora) and Red Hat had a fairly excellent reputation for stability with longer support life cycles. All good things must come to a close however and IBM (the current parent company of Red Hat) seemingly decided to prematurely end of life CentOS 8 and move the entire CentOS project upstream of Red Hat pushing it into a more developmental project versus a stable project. One of the co-founders of CentOS created the Rocky Linux project to replace CentOS as a downstream alternative. For now, I will continue to run out the servers I have running CentOS 7 until they are officially EOL’d and will look into containerization at that point.
In the end, I see one real option for both stability and long term support, Red Hat. If you are aware of Red Hat’s business model, you may be thinking “but Red Hat costs money or Red Hat isn’t open source” to which you would be quite incorrect on both accounts. Red Hat costs money to license but an individual can create a free development account which is truly free and includes 16 licenses to run Red Hat as a desktop or server you just have to remember to renew the account every year. This is the way I’ve been testing and evaluating various servers and desktops on Red Hat and it does make Red Hat much more accessible to the general public (in a world where you buy a PC that comes preloaded with Windows).
Getting it going
Red Hat installs just like Fedora and CentOS through Anaconda. The only real gotchas involving Red Hat are getting Docker (instead of Podman) installed which is done by installing the CentOS repo from Docker, installing Wine (to run Winbox in my case), and getting the rest of my commonly used applications installed (Slack, Brave, Atom, etc) all of which have RPM packages published to ease installation. So until an update on this experiment, wish me luck.
