Has anyone tried Oracle Linux yet? I did, and had a rather underwhelming experience installing it and trying install simple applications like GIMP, LibreOffice, etc. They simply won’t install on it! Please let me know what you think. Thanks;
Pradip Sagdeo
Maybe you could elaborate more on this.
Well, the minimal install is basically useless. The install with GUI looks fine. There is a paucity of installable software packages.The products such as GIMP are listed in the software installer and there is an install button. However, soon after beginning the process, pops up an error message saying that the installation cannot continue because the software is incompatible with the system. All three products I tried ended up this way. There is no default office installation. With nothing but the operating system, maybe with Oracle database, the computer is severely limited in use. With other distros, there is dependency checking and additional libraries are downloaded as needed. Ubuntu and Mint are very good with these. About the rest, the less said the better. No wonder MS Windows remains the operating system of choice by the masses and the corporations.
I don’t think people choose Windows because there are some issues on Oracle Linux. People choose Windows because they have no choice but to choose Windows, since it is the only operating system that is targeted by the huge mass of software that is out there. If every software company would suddenly produce all its software for primarily Debian and Ubuntu, Windows would go down within hours.
Oracle has long been an opponent of open source. Don’t expect their open-source initiatives to be anything but self-serving. See
Big corporations such Microsoft, Oracle and others, could stay far of Linux.
Linux is free and NO pretend earn Money$ of anything form.Big such IBM, Intel
and others, help Linux ahead ( Improve Linux ); but others only wish advantages
upon Linux, i desagree completely with Microsoft, Oracle and others. 
Can’t stand the company… but one has to work with them…
Loved dealing with Sun microsystems, but they plummetted severely when Larry Ellison bought them out… rang the death knell for Solaris and Sparc… some great products / tech came out of Sun, NFS, ZFS to name a few…
anyway - Oracle has been my “bread and butter” for the better part of the last decade…
worked three years in a big Oracle shop, with some Solaris on Sparc (and LDoms), ZFS appliance NAS, ExaData, and Oracle VM running on Oracle x86 servers, with maybe 100 or more Oracle Linux (5 and 6) VM’s running therein, plus Oracle SAN (rebadged StorageTek gear).
Horses for courses… I’d never use OEL for a desktop OS, probably not CentOS either…
If you want RPM - I’d suggest get a free developer license from Red Hat and go RHEL 7.5, or just Fedora 28 or 29…
I love ZFS, it’s great.
In Oracle’s defence - I kinda really like VirtualBox… It’s free! And there doesn’t seem to be any signs of Oracle messing with the “freeness” or general availability of it… And it was originally bought by Sun microsystems, and Oracle seem to be doing a sterling job keeping it updated…
I’d find doing my job tricky without vbox - I use it all the time - e.g. I don’t have any Windows machines at home, but I just cannot get Checkpoint VPN (p.s. I REALLY hate Checkpoint and Juniper VPN clients - why can’t they be like Cisco which has like 3, 2 of which are open source, VPN client solutions) client to connect and setup a tunnel in any version of Linux I’ve tried (I’ve seen online reports where people have had success - but not me) - so I keep a vbox Windows 7 VM and use I.E. on that to connect to my work’s VPN…
And I nearly always test things first on a local Linux VM before I go and change stuff in production…