
Ask HN: Is Anyone Using Oracle Linux? - top_post
Other than being forced to when purchasing their appliances, is anyone actually willingly going out of their way to install Oracle Linux? If so why?
======
rshnotsecure
Back in late 2016 a lot was made about a 20+ year Oracle/Linux veteran at ORCL
jumping ship to Microsoft to lead their burgeoning Linux group.

9 months later the guy returned to Oracle. Always thought that spoke a little
bit to the quality of OEL, especially after this profile from BI:
[https://www.businessinsider.com/wim-coekaerts-microsoft-
open...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wim-coekaerts-microsoft-open-source-
executive-interview-2016-8)

MSFT and Linux seem to be doing cool things right now, so I assume he returned
to Oracle our of some love for the product, and not because he didn’t like
what he saw at MSFT.

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trelliscoded
Yes, ksplice plus free licenses in Oracle Cloud. Maybe plan to have heavy
abstraction from the OS beforehand.

~~~
top_post
ksplice is about the only reason I could see. How often are you using ksplice
for patching where downtime isn't an option?

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jlgaddis
At my previous job (small ISP), I had several such machines running various
public-facing services.

It was (as best as I can recall) perhaps a year or so after RHEL 6 dropped
and, naturally, I was planning to use CentOS 6 for several new servers to be
deployed (as most existing servers were running CentOS 5).

Unfortunately, while the 5.x releases of CentOS came out relatively quickly
after RHEL, the first couple releases of 6.x were _waaaaay_ behind! Around
this same time, Oracle was pushing OEL over CentOS pretty hard [0], had
recently announced their free public package repository (yum.oracle.com?) [1],
and even had a "CentOS-to-OEL" shell script [2] you could run on existing
CentOS hosts.

IIRC, it took them a couple months to get OEL 6.0 out the door, but it was
still something like six months ahead of the CentOS 6.0 release! Fortunately,
by 6.2 or so, CentOS had apparently got things figured out and were usually
only two weeks or so behind RHEL. Yet, Oracle was still managing to push out
minor releases and updates quicker. [0]

As these were public-facing servers I was about to deploy, the delay in
releasing security updates was a big factor for me. I ended up deploying OEL6
on a number of new servers (although I never used ksplice, the UEK, or gave
Oracle a single dollar) and continued to maintain them for several years
without any issues that come to mind. I left $job right about a year ago and
there were still a handful of those machines running then. Honestly, I would
not be surprised to learn that some of them are still up and running today!

( _EDIT_ : At least two of them are still up and running right now.)

(Side note: I had a 1U Sun server in one of our racks that hosted my personal
web sites, e-mail, etc. From February 2013 until about three months ago --
when the hardware finally gave up the magic smoke -- it also ran Oracle Linux
6.)

(Disclaimer: I absolutely _loathe_ Oracle and everything about them -- and ol'
Larry -- but I still think that was the best decision at the time. Like many
folks, I had high expections for CentOS once Red Hat took it under their wing
but I've been quite disappointed.)

[0]:
[https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/](https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos/)

[1]: [https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/free-updates-and-errata-
for-o...](https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/free-updates-and-errata-for-oracle-
linux)

[2]:
[https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos2ol.sh](https://linux.oracle.com/switch/centos2ol.sh)

~~~
wademealing
I think thats changing with CentOS stream ( see
[https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/09/24/changes-to-
cen...](https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2019/09/24/changes-to-centos-what-
centos-stream-means-for-developers/) ) this probably means that CentOS will
have a reduced ramp up time for releases.

Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat.

------
jaytaylor
Oracle Linux works fine many cases, in fact I've never found significant
differences between OEL, Centos, or Redhat. Under the covers there is the UEK
variant (unbreakable kernel), but again, as a developer it hasn't mattered.

Ubuntu 19.04 offers a radically more well-designed GUI and superior overall
user experience compared to all Centos derivatives, and all previous versions
of Ubuntu I've used. I've yet to meet a single soul genuinely using OEL7 full
time on their primary machine. It's always Ubuntu these days :)

~~~
abvr
OL too comes with GNOME out of the box and there is always KDE if one wants to
switch.

------
mikece
I’m surprised Oracle sells their version of Linux when they could simply sell
Solaris which is supposed to be “light years better” according to the couple
Solaris sysadmins I know.

(I’m not a sysadmin so I don’t know if they were engaging in hyperbole or
not.)

~~~
ncmncm
If solarix really were better, there would be demand for it.

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rurban
Only for dev work, because of dtrace. Wouldn't dare to use it in a business,
though it would be fine technically.

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suyash
I am, it is very stable as it's built on top of Enterprise RedHat Linux
version. (Disclaimer I work at Oracle).

------
lebrad
No

