The vegan comparison’s a bit of a tangent but most vegans I know keep their heads down because they only need to mention it once for everyone to start complaining that they did. It’s not really fair to characterize them as wanting to live life on hard mode and brag about it. They genuinely want to protect and respect animals, they find it’s not so hard after all, and mostly they do it discreetly.
… but most Arch users I know keep their heads down because they only need to mention it once for everyone to start complaining that they did. It’s not really fair to characterize them as wanting to use Linux on hard mode and brag about it. They genuinely want to fully customize thier system, they find it’s not so hard after all, and mostly they do it discreetly.
It’s essentially running a linux container on top of your own system. Which means you can use the toolkit of those distros ( for example the package manager of that system) to install apps from their repos, even gui apps. But those containers also has access to your orijinal filesystem so be careful how you use them. Might want to watch Brodie’s video on it.
To tag onto this, what makes RHEL so special? Is it just the support you get from Red Hat or is there something about the distro that makes it so widely used?
The support is a huge part of it. Being able to submit a ticket or call in to get help with a strange quirk is extremely valuable to a lot of companies. Additionally, having a licensed distribution like this means there’s built in trust. Red Hat has been a big player in this space forever and are well trusted already, too. So there’s a huge community of people who have used the product to talk to or hire. They also have certifications for rhel, supported by Red Hat, and those carry weight in the industry to some degree.
It is 100% the support. Corporations pay big money to have experts on call to fix things fast when they break, and there’s basically no other player for that kind of model in the Linux space.
Support contracts for risk mitigation is a big part of it, and the other is RH release engineering is amazing.
Aside from that, RHEL, and clones, is a very straight forward, clean distro. It’s very focused with everything doted and tidy, and overall, it has a very uncomplicated feel to it. In contrast Debian derivatives are kind of messy, and SUSE tries to stuff every function into a single application.
RHEL does push a lot of technology. Out of the stable distros, it will be the first to put tech into production. RH does a lot with integration with other systems. This has kept me off of SUSE in the past. RHEL was more tech forward, comparatively.
It’s hard, and better have package manager built in. It’s not enough in the enterprise sadly… Just saying, and I think most Corporate with agree with it.
Beyond support agreements that others are mentioning, the huge requirement for the shop I work at (mid-scale high performance computing center) it’s 3rd party vendor package support. Mellanox/nvidia, whamcloud, slurm, vast, and on and on. Driver packages targeting rhel kernels are an industry standard offering if a vendor supports linux. That’s not always the case with Debian variants, for instance.
Same with huge applications and proprietary compiler suites (think matlab and the intel compiler suite or OneAPI). These are hugely important packages for a number of shops.
Don’t get me wrong, I can build against plenty of other distros but my vendors target rhel as a first class citizen for both build scripts and straight binary packaging.
One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don’t have to use any particular distro if it doesn’t fit your use case or preferences. I don’t use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).
Oh in that case. Let me look up an open source tool I’ve used for PDFs before. It might be able to do it.
It’s called pdfsam.
I’m not sure if it can do what you are asking, but I think it will do the trick.
You might be able to use the convert function of ffmpeg to extract the pages as png and then recreate a new pdf from the pngs that were extracted, but this may not work for your specific file.
Arch doesn’t “break” you are doing shit you have no clue about which in turn creates problems, which you then have to fix. Still if you plainly install and update it, I doubt you will notice much difference from an Arch install compared to any other distro.
My Behringer UMC22 interface works perfectly on Linux, including with pipewire. I use it with a Rode NTG-1 shotgun mic, and it also drives my studio monitors.
My Samson Q2U also works great if you’re looking for a cheap all-in-one option.
You use Gentoo if you want control and transparency. It’s great it if you are the kind of Linux user who wants things in a certain way and wants them to stay that way.
Do you want to use systemd or something else? Do you want to use pulseaudio, some other sound daemon or no sound daemon at all? X11 or Wayland? Emacs built with gtk, some other toolkit or no toolkit at all? Do you care if firefox is built with telemetry support?
If you have no opinion about this sort of stuff or your choices align well enough with a binary distribution then you are probably just as good using something else.
If you want to get a job as a “Linux admin” then Red Hat is basically what you want as a “default”. Fedora will give you something you can use at home that’s broadly similar. You will need to learn more than just that though.
Using Fedora at home because you have to use Red Hat at work? NOPE, thanks. Also I wonder if that RHEL focus is mostly american companies? Because here in europe I rarely see RHEL used from my limited perspective.
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