How Red Hat Just Quietly, Radically Transformed Enterprise Server Linux
ZDNET, Monday, June 2nd, 2025
RHEL 10 becomes the first major enterprise Linux distro to discard traditional packaging and embrace immutable. See how we got here.
Long before Linux was introduced, I worked as a Unix system administrator. In those days, I downloaded the source code, unpacked the tarball archive it arrived in, compiled it, and installed it whenever I needed to update my system or install a new package. It was a real pain in the rump.
With the arrival of Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4) in 1989, things got better with the first package manager system: pkgadd, pkgrm, and pkginfo. Companies such as IBM, with its AIX Unix distribution and its System Management Interface Tool (SMIT), and Sun, with Solaris 2.0, released their own proprietary versions, and my sysadmin life got a lot easier.