Bloaty bloaty bloat bloat: Red Hat 7.3

• Once upon a time, you could install Red Hat Linux in under 15 minutes.
• Once upon a time, you could upgrade Red Hat Linux to a new version in under 30 minutes.
• Once upon a time, a Red Hat Linux upgrade between minor versions (e.g. Red Hat 7.0 to Red Hat 7.1) actually worked.
• Once upon a time, Red Hat Linux could print to an HP inkjet and have it actually work.
• Once upon a time, Red Hat Linux had a control panel with all its system administration programs on it.
• Once upon a time, Red Hat Linux didn't suck.

As I type this, my server is currently in the 4th hour of attempting to upgrade from Red Hat 7.2 to Red Hat 7.3. I would have been quicker to blow away my installation and re-install from scratch. However, if I do that, I will be doing so with something other than Red Hat Linux.

So you say, "a fresh install will work better." Sorry. On the Dells at work, RH 7.3 installs, but configures the XFree86 server incorrectly, and there's no way to make it configure XFree86 correctly without directly tweaking the config files. An install at work took over 40 minutes for a bare-bones "server" install. Granted, a 533mhz Dell with 128mb of RAM and an 8gb hard drive is not the world's fastest computer. But this is ridiculous.

Once you get Red Hat 7.3 installed, then comes the fun part. Mandrake 8.2 populates your root menus in KDE with links to all the various systems administration programs. It's not as good as a control panel, but it's good enough. RH 7.3, however, gives you no guidance at all. There is no menu item for "Open Webmin", for example. What you see is what you get, and that's it.

Printing under Red Hat 7.3 is equally problematic. My printer at work is an HP inkjet attached to a Windows NT 4.0 server. Under no circumstances and no combination of device driver settings for the Foomatic filters would Red Hat 7.3 generate a page that didn't degenerate into gibberish. The only way I could print with this thing was to tell my system to use the 'lp' spool on our CVS server, which is running Red Hat 6.2 (which had an uptime of 172 days until a power failure the other day took it down), and to use no print driver (i.e., let the Red Hat 6.2 system drive the printer). This is ridiculous. I have to print via a 2 year old print filter system?!

My summary: Red Hat 7.3 is a bloated, slow, and difficult-to-administer monstrosity. It is broken in so many ways, design-wise, that I would never voluntarily use it. Mandrake 8.2 is better than Red Hat 7.3 in every possible way except one: market share. Market share is why I will be forced to use Red Hat 7.3 at work -- the vendor of our jukebox virtualization software only supports Red Hat and SuSE, and the YAST licensing means we aren't going to be using SuSE anytime soon. In short, if Red Hat was intending to become the Microsoft of the Linux industry, they have arrived.

So how did this happen? Well, first of all, Red Hat Linux is no longer put together by a small team of very good people. Most of the people who created Red Hat Linux cashed out their stocks at the top of IPO frenzy and retired to a ranch in the hill country of North Carolina. What you have is a large team of average people with no vision, where the few people who do have vision are drowned out in the hub-bub and cannot get the others to do what's needed to make Red Hat Linux tight, focused, and easy to install, upgrade, configure, and use. Red Hat has, in other words, gone the way of Netscape Communications. One man wrote the version 1.0 of Netscape for Unix that took the Internet by storm. A team of hundreds wrote the disasterous version 4.0 of Netscape that resulted in the final victory of Microsoft in the browser wars. A hundred bodies cannot substitute for vision, and a hundred marketing surveys saying the software needs feature X cannot substitute for vision. In my opinion Red Hat, in short, has hopped off the Cluetrain, and it's unclear if they'll be able to board it again. Not that they need to. With 50%+ market share, why bother, after all?

And that, my friend, is how mediocrity becomes the norm.

I can't escape from Linux. My employer's software is developed under Linux. Linux sucks -- between buggy kernels, bloated libraries, and five jillion different versions of said bloated libraries, all of which have different bugs, Linux is far from being the sveldt and speedy little OS that it once was. But it sucks less than most other operating systems. (That's a ringing endorsement, isn't it? "Linux: It Sucks Less"). But while I am forced to use Linux due to driver issues, I can choose to use an administrator-friendly version of Linux on my own computers -- and Red Hat 7.3 ain't it.

Finally: This review is undeniably jaundiced by the ridiculous and error-prone upgrade procedure that has just disasterously failed in the computer room behind me. I haven't seen anything so pitiful and pathetic since the upgrade from Red Hat 4.2 to Red Hat 5.0 (boy, and was 5.0 a disaster! But at least 5.0, the first glibc version of Red Hat Linux, was trying to push the state of the art... 7.3 doesn't have that excuse). All I'll note is that I've used every version of Red Hat Linux since 3.0.3, and Red Hat 6.2 was probably the last version of Red Hat Linux that I would have voluntarily run without being forced to do so by an employer.

Finally, regarding other distributions: SuSE has legal problems that prevent me from using it (I refuse to agree to the YaST license). Mandrake 8.2 has its own problems with bloat, but compensates by being much easier to deal with from a user's point of view, as well as being very Red Hat compatible. Slackware is impossible to upgrade, and I don't like re-installing regularly on my production systems. I cannot abide Debian. I've run it a few times, and ended up wiping it out. Debian is the FreeBSD of Linux. If I want to run FreeBSD, I'll run FreeBSD.

Hmm... that might be an idea!

--Eric