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0 pointssofixa7mo ago0 comments

> which would be Ubuntu's NIH syndrome

Red Hat do the same. They reinvented the wheel on multiple occasions (systemd and it's whole ecosystem like systemd-resolved and timed and the whole kitchen sink; podman, buildah, dnf, etc etc.)

They just have more success on getting their NIH babies accepted as the standard by everyone else. Canonical just fail at that (often for good reasons, Unity was downright crap for some time) and abandon stuff, which doesn't help their future causes.

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jeltz7mo ago

Canonical did their own NIH init daemon called Upstart which failed due to the fundamental design and the implementation being plain bad. Redhat builds better software which is why their NIH gets more adoption.

curt157mo ago

ChromeOS still uses upstart.

teddyh7mo ago

Upstart came before systemd; much of the reason for systemd’s creation was fixing what was considered fundamental design mistakes in Upstart: <http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd#:~:text=On%20Upsta...> (under the heading “On Upstart”).

homebrewer7mo ago

> systemd

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530

> like systemd-resolved and timed

They're not forced on anybody, they're not required by systemd, and many distributions use more feature-rich alternatives (including, afaik, RHEL — last time I looked at it, they used dnsmasq and chrony). They're also often shipped as separate optional packages:

  $ apt search 'systemd-timesyncd|systemd-resolved'

  systemd-resolved/testing,now 257.7-1 amd64
  systemd-timesyncd/testing 257.7-1 amd64

> podman, buildah

Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.

> dnf

Only used by RHEL and its upstream Fedora?

---

All of this makes very little sense.

yjftsjthsd-h7mo ago

>> podman, buildah

> Still not anywhere near as popular as Docker. Although technically they're far better than Docker, and if anyone is using them, it's for that reason.

NIH packages are generally expected to be less popular, yes. They have some technical merit, though in my opinion that's mostly trade-offs rather than one being strictly better than the other. I would be surprised if everybody using them is using them because of technical merit as opposed to it being pushed by the distro.

ACS_Solver7mo ago

Red Hat builds really good stuff. NIH is sometimes right because nobody invented the stuff at all. Standard Unix tools are great but they don't solve everything, so we've ended up with most distros having "the Debian way" or "the Red Hat way", the main difference of course being deb/apt/dpkg vs rpm/yum/dnf. When building an embedded system with Yocto, the basic choices are also Debian or Red Hat style, though you can of course do anything.

Special mention goes to NetworkManager, which has become the de facto standard way to configure networking because it's good. And with nmcli I can even remember how to connect to wifi from single user mode.

npteljes7mo ago

>They just have more success on getting their NIH babies accepted as the standard by everyone else.

This depends on the phrasing. We could also say that Red Hat produces actually useful software, in contrast with Canonical, whose developments don't seem to provide value over existing solutions.

We could also say that Canonical tries really hard to do exactly what Red Hat does, but in a slightly different space, and not very successfully.

the_why_of_y7mo ago

A major difference is that Canonical projects have copyright assignment policies, while Red Hat projects don't - this probably explains a lot of the difference in adoption dynamics.

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