On 2/11/21 2:13 PM, Lamar Owen wrote: > On 2/11/21 11:18 AM, Nicolas Kovacs wrote: >> For the past couple years, my solution has been to use RHEL clones >> (CentOS and Oracle Linux) on servers only (multi-user.target). I've >> moved all my graphical installations (workstation, laptops, desktop >> clients) to OpenSUSE Leap + KDE. > > For a really long time I was pretty successful in running EL on both the > desktop and the server. It HAS been getting way harder to do this. The > EPEL, ELrepo, and RPMfusion repositories do a fantastic job overall, but > there were way too many things missing from EPEL8 especially where the > desktop experience was becoming a pretty sizable drain on my time > building the packages I needed from Fedora. KiCAD and Sigrok were the > toughest. > > I greatly prefer running the same OS version on my desktops and servers; > makes management a lot easier. So this is part of why I am in the midst > of evaluating a wholesale migration to Debian 10. On the server it > works well, if somewhat different in setup; on the desktop it works so > much better, with a huge and maintained repository, where I haven't had > to dip into a PPA but once, and that was for a quick one-off package. > It's in the virtualization arena where I am gobsmacked; I'm evaluating > Proxmox, which is based on Debian 10, using the no-subscription > repositories. Let me tell you, Proxmox has one more slick and highly > integrated experience. Relative to running a KVM host with only the > stock CentOS 8 cockpit and virt-manager, the Proxmox experience blew me > away. > > I didn't realize just how much time I was spending finding third-party > packages for EL8 until I didn't have to. > > Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL has > a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with, amongst > other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon to > EL and needs to be very tightly controlled. It's just more difficult to > get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as > long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm -ba' > .... back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot wasn't a > cardinal sin..... > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for. There are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc. It is much harder than EL7.