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Comment by smcleod | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu has nothing to do with Podman / Redhat. Ubuntu also has a terrible track record of not aligning where it makes sense with other distorts and not properly testing packages - it's just a bit of a flaky distro in general.

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> . Ubuntu also has a terrible track record of not aligning where it makes sense with other distorts

You mean not aligning with Red Hat and what they're pushing on everyone else. Ubuntu is on a shorter release cycle compared to Debian so they're usually the first non-Red Hat distro with new stuff. Systemd vs Upstart, Unity vs GNOME (3?), etc.

They try to do new stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone should blindly follow RH's lead. Systemd was objectively shit at the beginning, run by a person who was actively hostile to any feedback he didn't like. There were multiple highly critical bugs whose patches weren't backported ('just update' as if it's that easy with the sprawling beast that is systemd).

> not properly testing packages

What do you mean? I only recall one popular instance of an issue with Ubuntu packages, and it's when they released a major upgrade to Samba because backporting a critical security fix to the previous major version, the one that came with the distro originally, was too hard (in their words), which ended up breaking Samba for a bunch of people.

Ubuntu isn't "flakey". It makes a different tradeoff compared to RHEL - slightly newer version of stuff for slightly less stability. For many orgs that's preferable to obsolete 10 year old versions of most software for amazing stability.

> obsolete 10 year old versions

Talk about hyperboles. RHEL 8 is from 2018 and has had considerably more updates than Ubuntu 18.04. In fact some packages might even be newer than what is in 20.04.

But you have Ubuntu 22.04 if you want newer versions of everything.

You also have RHEL 9 then.

Maybe, but plenty of RHEL8 packages still package versions from 10+ years ago.

It was forked from Fedora 5 years ago and it has versions from 10+ years ago?

Can you name a few specifically?

Red Hat introduced modules with RHEL8, meaning they can easily make available more up-to-date versions of software if necessary. It's still not bleeding edge, but eg. PostgreSQL 13 was released on 2020-09-24 and that's available with support in RHEL 8 as a module. Similarly, you have eg. PHP 8, Ruby 3.0 and other software released after RHEL 8's initial release.

Modules are much nicer to use than the previous software collection system because they actually replace the "original" package, so it's just a straight version upgrade without having to worry about fixing configuration files etc. if it's compatible.

The trade off of modules, which it pays to be aware of, is that they have different support lifecycles to the distro they are in. They publish a list that is updates as new modules are released.[1] what this means in practice is that some appstream modules may only have a year or two of support, while other may have until distribution release EOL. For example, in RHEL 8 PHP 7.4 is supported until 2029, almost 9 years after released as a module, but earlier 7.x versions and 8.0 which are also modules have lifecycles that range from 18-24 months.

There's a lot of flexibility in this to support both those that need newer versions of things as well as older stable versions, just be aware and choose and plan accordingly.

1: https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/rhel-app-st...

I don't understand, Ubuntu releases new releases every 6 months? If you want the latest Docker/Linux kernel/whatever, just download the latest Ubuntu. They may be behind on one or two packages but that's it.

Normally you could also grab the releases from the source directly and let the upstream source figure out compatibility for you. However, it seems like the folks over at Podman have discontinued their external repository, so I guess they don't care about bringing new versions to Ubuntu either.

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