Before you run away screaming, “Not another Anti-RedHat Rant!!” hold your horses and hang in there.
Most are based in some RedHat will be or is Microsoft. Or something about how they should be more like Debian. Or even sillier RedHat will make things more consistent by altering KDE to be more GNOME, consistency heaven forbid. I don’t have a problem with any of the above, well maybe if they were more Debian but I digress.
The problem that I face is actually wanting to pay RedHat for the 8.0 but damm’d if they have made it way too confusing. See what I want is to buy some CDs for the initial installation and have access to the “up2date” functionality, think Debian apt-get or WindowsUpdate but for everything on the system, for the run of the 8.X Series or at least a year seems resonable. Now it seems like something like this product and service combo should cost something like $20 – $100(I’m in a generous mood). Now enters the problem how do I get that option, or something similar?
There is RedHat Linux 8.0 Professional, RedHat Linux 8.0 Personal and some mention of Red Hat Network Basic Service but as far as I can tell the only real difference between the Pro and Personal is $110 in price and 30 vs. 60 days access to “Red Hat Network Basic Service” but oh, wait. One can get a year of the Red Hat Network for $60. So for my high end of $100 I can get what I want, some CDs and up2date for a year.
So where is the rant if I found what I wanted, though it is maximum of my price range? Well it was way too complicated and confusing to figure something so simple out. Honestly if it wasn’t for being so pissed and writing a rant I would have blown off RedHat and went over to Cheap*Bytes and picked up Debian CDs. Still might.
It just seems that the more RedHat gets it’s act together the more find something else to screw up and that I guess is what I’m really ranting about.
One reply on “Problem with RedHat”
I hear ya, brother! I like the fact that RedHat is now trying to unifyt he desktops for the user. I like the fact that they have a service for those that simply want up-to-date software without the headaches that *can* occur with Debian. I like the fact that RedHat is going down the “Linux Standards” path, even if the standard was kinda set because of RedHat’s “dominance” of the market.
Getting a distro that the average user, whether business or home, can *use* is a good thing. While I think the problem with Gnome and KDE is really the fact that no right-minded developer would ever write commercial software for it, the unification of the two efforts would go a long way to making Linux a more useable product.
So it is discouraging to see RedHat come up with some screwed-up MS way of selling their product. To me, the better way for them to sell their distro would be to simply make different distros for different uses. Home and business users are basically the same, so that should actually be just one distro(have the standard OOo, media players, etc. etc. without the developer crap like Super-X-Emacs or whatever.. make it clean and simple). Clustering and high-end servers should be another (this one is hard to do, yet obvious..). Embedded and development should be another (Add all the editors, compilers, strange languages, etc.).
All of the distros come with a year of up2date. When the year is up, you spend your money again and get a new distro release and another year of up2date.
Or something equally easy. And cheaper than MS, hopefully.
Of course, in my ob OSX comment, Apple should do the same: make .mac a $150 a year service (or so), but you also get all OS upgrades, iTools, etc. That way it is a no brainer for people to get it, and you gaurantee a constant stream of cash.