Having had to use those kinds of machines often as a user, it is a total pain. For some reason, these enterprise distributions end up being used a lot on scientific and machine learning clusters. You have to deal with 5-10 year old bugs that are solved in every other distribution already and you have to jump through hoops to make modern software run.
For me it always felt like the system administrators externalizing the cost on the users and developers (which are the same in many cases).
Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.
You can run whatever you want in containers. You don't even need root permissions. Red Hat's podman can launch containers without the need for root privileges.
> Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.
Fedora today is what RHEL will be tomorrow. They quite literally freeze a Fedora release to use as a base for RHEL's next release. If you like Fedora today you're gonna like Fedora tomorrow.
If you can get Nix running on these ancient machines it'll bring you all up2date packages you want, you can create Nix profiles that you install in a pre-configured path so you can use the packages in systemd too if you fancy.
It's really really great, even if you don't use or plan to use NixOS (Nix was born long before NixOS).
For me it always felt like the system administrators externalizing the cost on the users and developers (which are the same in many cases).
Despite my dislike of enterprise Linux, Red Hat is doing a lot of awesome work all around the stack. IMO Fedora and the immutable distros are the real showcase of all the things they do.