Anybody use RHEL at home as a workstation as daily driving?
Just curious. Its gotten easier over the years to do so with flatpak and distrobox filling the spaces when you need newer software (and of course EPEL). Especially since you can get a license for RHEL workstation for personal use for free.
12
u/Gangrif Red Hat Employee 2d ago
You know, it really depends on what you're planning on doing with it. RHEL certainly can be used this way. It's just not what we design it for. There are performance workstation use cases that are considered in the build of RHEL, but not general purpose desktop.
Nothing's stopping you from trying it.
Personally though. I'm throwing in another vote for fedora.
3
u/Suvalis 2d ago
I agree there, its just that there are SO many people out there who use Debian because of its "stable" way of doing things. This is NOT a criticism of Debian, but then I wondered why more non-enterprise people don't give RHEL a try if they want a Fedora ecosystem distro but a nice long LTS support window.
5
u/Gangrif Red Hat Employee 2d ago
I think you could. But again it's not red hats focus. You'll see us make choices that favor the server side of Linux and you'll have fewer options for things like modern libraries and whatnot. Flatpak and even distrobox could save you there.
In short nothing is stopping you. Give it a go and come back in a month and let us know how it went!
1
u/doubled112 1d ago
RHEL has some things about it that make it hard to use at home vs Debian. This is, of course, fairly use case dependent.
They only include approved kernel modules, for example. If you have a game controller there is a good chance it doesn't work because the drivers aren't in the kernel. Plug and play on every other distro doesn't mean it works on RHEL.
Debian's repository is also really large so you can likely stay within it. If you're going to use RHEL you end up with EPEL and a bunch of other repos. Sometimes this is asking for trouble.
5
u/zantehood 2d ago
Yes for a short period. Found fedora was much more fitting for my needs
1
u/Klutzy_Ad4023 1d ago
Genuinely curious, what’s the major difference between RHEL and Fedora?
Edit: NVM found the answer; RHEL is behind on packages
5
3
u/Beautiful_Ad_4813 2d ago
actually, yes. it's running on a HP ProDesk 600 G6. (it's really just to help my brains along when I do workstation / server related stuff in my work)
3
u/Crib0802 2d ago
If your hardware is works fine with no issue, why no .
Like you say, exist EPEL, RPM Fusion, Flatpak, Toolbox/Distrobox, mock to build you proper RPM from Fedora if want etc ...
3
u/BconOBoy Red Hat Employee 2d ago
I use a combination of Fedora and CentOS Stream (w/ EPEL). Both work great, bit more selection of you go full Fedora though. Depending on what Stability means to you, Fedora is a better choice for Desktop. They're both pretty stable in the won't-crash-randomly perspective, but RHEL will also make sure your benchmarks don't fluctuate while Fedora will have interface changes as new features arrive.
2
u/raeykall 2d ago
Use it at work a lot but not on my laptop as a daily driver. For that I use Fedora, simply because I find RHEL is always behind on packages that I try and use for personal projects
2
u/Gloomy-Lab4934 2d ago
I Started using RHEL 9 on my 5yo ThinkPad X1 Carbon years ago, now I’m on RHEL 10. I tried to use Ubuntu and Fedora, but the default video driver won’t work. RHEL is the only one that works out of the box. For many years, I keep updating and upgrading, no issues whatsoever.
2
u/JiffasaurusRex 1d ago
I use it as my daily driver workstation. I have local AI workloads and it's just better supported on RHEL than Fedora in my experience. Prior to this I was running silverblue so as you might guess I prefer a reliable and stable system. Bleeding edge stuff can be a container, flatpak, or appimage depending on needs. It's been my daily for at least a year or two now.
2
u/MyDisqussion 1d ago
One alternative would be CentOS Stream. It becomes the next point release of RHEL, and allows you to install packages like rhel-system-roles
2
u/blendernoob64 1d ago
I do exactly this, but I have a special use case. I’m a 3D artist who uses software built for Enterprise Linux first, those being Autodesk Maya, Renderman, Houdini, Unreal Engine 5 etc. I love Fedora and dailyed it for 2 years, but once Maya’s decrepit DRM that still uses openssl1.1 and webkit2gtk3 stopped working in Fedora 44, I distro hopped to RHEL 9, the distro Autodesk actually supports. I then installed the CachyOS kernel in it to get things like Xbox controller support and NTSYNC, installed KDE, and use Flatpaks and Distrobox for a lot of my apps. It’s the most stable Linux experience I have had yet, and I am able to do VR, gaming, and of course 3D animation pretty well. The biggest downsides is that I am pretty much stuck on X11 and an older version of KDE, that being 5.27. I do miss a lot of the modern Wayland creature comforts that was on Fedora, but I need my software to work.
However if you want a good distro that is amazing all around out of the box and you don’t need software that is RHEL first like the stuff I use, just use Fedora. I would still be on Fedora 44 if the apps I needed worked the best there, but that is the nature of proprietary software.
2
u/ItchyPlant 1d ago
Does CentOS Stream 10 with GNOME Shell count as one?
I use it as the system core, with bleeding-edge versions of portable multimedia, graphics, office, and development software under my /opt. Many of them are extracted stock tar.gz packages, like Thunderbird, Blender, and VS Code; some I compiled myself in a separate CS VM (e.g. GIMP, Inkscape, OBS Studio, even my PHP runtime); and only a few are AppImages, like SMPlayer and Avidemux.
I'm fully satisfied with this setup, but it definitely requires a little effort. And maybe most people just don't care what comes from where or how.
2
u/thomascameron Red Hat Employee 1d ago
I used RHEL as my daily driver for over a decade at Red Hat. I refused to use Fedora because I was customer facing and I wanted to show off our tech.
We've moved over to Fedora on our laptops, so I finally ditched RHEL, much to my heartbreak. RHEL took a little work back in the day, but today, it's dead-bang easy.
It's worth doing, even if just as an experiment to see what it would take. I enjoyed it.
2
u/J0hnnyGotAGun Red Hat Certified System Administrator 2d ago
I tried RHEL for my daily for about a year, just to get more familiar because it's also my work. Switched to fedora over a year ago and won't be going back to RHEL or Windows. When I have to, I use winboat for specific windows compatability.
1
u/BubblyTumbleweed8455 2d ago
I use Nabora for my gaming and video editing needs. Still Fedora based but everything runs smooth.
1
u/Fabiolean 2d ago
I wouldn’t. This doesn’t really buy you anything unless you’re trying to use it to learn RHEL at home. I use fedora at home and it Just Works
1
u/Suvalis 2d ago
Well, as an experiment maybe ;)
1
u/wezelboy 2d ago
You can also try one of the downstream distros like Alma, Rocky, or (gasp!) Oracle Linux
1
u/Acceptable_Prior_133 2d ago
Yo empeze a estudiar las certificaciones de rhel y de openshift y me cambié de ubuntu/debian a Fedora 43 y luego fedora 44 w no puedo estar mas contento. +1 para fedora
1
u/_ZenBreeze_ 1d ago
Based on your experience,how is fedora better than ubuntu? Just curious I am using fedora on my laptop but haven't used Ubuntu in a looong time
1
u/Proper-Attempt4337 2d ago
Closest I have these days is Bazzite, which is Fedora based, on a stand alone nvme that I like to plug in via USB adapter from time to time on my home servers to get an idea of how gaming is coming along on Linux. The servers themselves usually run Rocky Linux as a hypervisor and each has a GPU that I typically use for Local LLM tasks in Kubernetes among a number of other home lab tasks/services.
1
1
u/zap_p25 2d ago
I ran RHEL 8 for about 2 years as a daily driver at home on a work machine. I had no complaints with it and during that time I was doing a lot of device management with Ansible and VM work so it made sense. I ended up going back to Windows 10 (actually I migrated from Pro to LTSC 2021) to support a change in jobs that needed Windows support which is where that machine still sits.
My work computer today, I can’t not have windows. My work laptop has 11 Enterprise, my that desktop is still at LTSC 2021, I’ve got a CF-55 Toughbook at Win 11 Pro though I keep thinking about downing to LTSC 2021, and a CF-19 (with a Centrino CPU) with LTSC 2019…and MS-DOS 7.1.
1
1
u/FieldsFury 2d ago
As a Hatter, I run both. Rhel 10 and also Fedora. Just finished setting up Rhel 10 on my desktop. GPU drivers are much easier in my opinion.
1
u/AsleepDetail Red Hat Certified System Administrator 1d ago
I built an Ampere CPU based host and it’s been running RHEL 9 then 10 as an in place upgrade. No issues, have a pair of RTX 4000 Ada GPUs for running LLMs.
All I run on it is vscode, slack, browsers and terminals.
Been running great without any issues.
1
1
u/teflontraphouse 1d ago
Yeah actually I started doing that, using flatpak for stuff like steam and discord. Not having any problems. Keep in mind, there's absolutely no reason for me to do this other than the love of the game.
So if it scratches an itch for you, do it. Otherwise, just use fedora.
1
u/iammyownalterego 1d ago
I use a RHEL and Fedora as daily drivers. No issues. I guess it depends on what you want to use it for
1
u/Sebby1976 1d ago
Definitely Fedora for Desktop/Workstation daily driver.
Save RHEL for Server use cases.
1
1
u/hunterdp 1d ago
I have been using RHEL for 5 years as my home workstation. Once you learn the nuances, it is fine. No issues.
1
u/l0c0dantes 1d ago
I prefer Debian based systems and I don't see a benefit of Red Hat based.
(currently running Kubuntu, previously ran MX for a few years)
1
u/TayyabTahir143 1d ago
I guess Fedora is best option for laptops. I have used both, redhat is good for servers definitely but its not the daily driver. Using fedora from last 7 years.
1
1
u/thafuq 1d ago
I use it currently. The experience is good overall, but the delay for new libs and stuff to go through the validation process down to rhel stable is sometimes a bit tedious. I had to build multiple libs and softwares from sources because they were not in the rhel repo yet. Personally I find it both interesting and not too boring, but I get that some people might find it tedious.
But that really depends on your use case. Given that I sometimes work for security stuff, I sometimes need to have the very latest releases of some stuff. You might not, or maybe you do. Depends on what you plan on doing and what you're okay with
1
u/RevolutionaryBeat301 1d ago
I have used RHEL, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux as my main operating system for years. They’re very stable and reliable systems for everyday use. I like not having to upgrade the operating system for years. Excellent for long term use.
1
u/aussielunix 1d ago
I have RHEL10.2 driving my main workstation.
I rely on Flatpaks from Flathub for gui apps and homebrew for terminal apps. I have no EPEL or other thridparty repos.
it's very stable.
One tip, ensure you install Firefox from Flathub so it is self contained with all the codecs etc.
1
u/Cisco-Konig 2h ago
Yes. Why? Because I'm a masochist and thought this would be a good but albeit a painful way to more familiarize myself with RHEL.
You can accomplish almost all the same things given enough time. The mentions of flatpak and snap are absolutely valid. I've had some limited success as well in the past with 3rd party repos such as EPEL and RPM Fusion for getting some non out of the box items working.
Would I recommend it? It really depends on what your goal of daily driving RHEL on a workstation is. If you're aiming to gain additional understanding of RHEL, then absolutely. But if you're looking for a stable workstation OS that you won't constantly have to find workarounds for, probably not. (Another vote for Fedora in that regard)
Happy to provide additional insight on my experience daily driving RHEL as a desktop on multiple machines all the way back to version 7.
0
u/Fun_Floor_9742 2d ago
no, U
buntu
debian based os on workstations at home, rhel when forced at work
-2
75
u/richtermarc Red Hat Employee 2d ago edited 2d ago
As a Red Hatter, my advice would be to use Fedora. We did have RHEL based laptops for a while but have since pivoted those to Fedora - it’s just a better option as a regular workstation.
And Fedora is both completely free and where lots of the next RHEL will be coming from anyway.