Oracle Linux Room for Improvement

Marcelo Muniz - PeerSpot reviewer
Database Engineer at kyndryl

Graphical support for the environment could be more like virtual reality. 

The solution is not as user friendly as Meet for IBM AIX. Meet has a more friendly operational system because the interface works in a better way. 

It would be beneficial to have universal integration with clouds around the world such as Amazon, Google, Azure, and Oracle.

It would be nice to have better features for governance types. 

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LLIEDNO - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. NetBackup System Administrator at University of Delaware

The graphic interface could be improved to work better in a desktop environment like Red Hat or Ubuntu.

Few people use the solution because its marketing is faltering. Unless companies buy other items from Oracle such as ACSLS for managing tape libraries, there is no need to use the solution. 

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AH
Database Administrator at ZTBL

The main challenge can be compatibility with products from other companies. When you mix products from different vendors, you might experience difficulties. Using products from the same platform simplifies things.

Before Oracle Linux existed, back in 2001 and 2003, Oracle didn't have its own operating system and used other versions of Linux. We faced problems with these. For example, the earlier Linux versions were 32-bit operating systems. This limited the amount of memory we could allocate to our Oracle database instances. Let's say we had a server with 128 GB of RAM; with a 32-bit Linux operating system, we couldn't use all of it for the database.

When later Linux releases became 64-bit, this limitation disappeared, giving us much more memory to work with. The compatibility with Oracle products is a big advantage. It makes it easier for DBAs (Database Administrators) to manage our databases. If my boss tells me two or three new servers are arriving tomorrow, it's not a problem. I can quickly set them up and prepare them – even doing installations on multiple servers at the same time.

Sometimes we have applications that only run on operating systems like Windows, creating difficulties. Microsoft's platform is easier for some people to understand, but troubleshooting issues can be quite challenging, even for experienced programmers. In contrast, troubleshooting on the Oracle platform is much simpler, which is a key benefit.

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Buyer's Guide
Oracle Linux
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle Linux. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
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Peter Karlsson - PeerSpot reviewer
System specialist at Savecore

There is a desire to include ZFS as a supported file system from the installation phase. I find it to be an excellent file system that significantly simplifies storage management on systems. Unlike other setups where you need both a file system and a volume manager, ZFS combines these functionalities into a single package. It provides a proven and stable solution, eliminating the need for continuous testing with different technologies. ZFS is enterprise-proven and, compared to other Linux file systems, stands out in terms of management efficiency. While some file systems may offer slightly faster speeds, ZFS excels in overall performance, manageability, and reliability, making it a top choice in the Linux world. Another notable aspect that could be improved is minor compatibility with Red Hat. This is crucial for customers seeking ISV support. ISVs often limit their support to a select few distributions, typically Red Hat, and maintaining compatibility is vital for application functionality.

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SM
Database administrator at SSnC

NTP communication should be more concrete and robust. Time drifts happen frequently, and the database restarts automatically to protect data integrity. The product should give a warning before the time drift happens. It should alert us about how long the time drift will take. Such features will make the product a very good OS.

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Gaurav Babbar - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Engineer at Natwest

The solution's security could be better and improved, but I am not sure.

Since it is a VM, it gets slow. It can be an area for improvement. So, we get a connection, making it not a very significant issue since it usually works well.

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Vijay Mehta - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - SAP at Capgemini

The price of Oracle Linux should improve, it is expensive compared to other solutions.

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Ayman Allam - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps and Automation Lead | Technical Expert at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

I did not really enjoy working with the solution. 

The deployment is a bit complex.

The community and the documentation were not great. I did not like the end-user experience and decided to move towards an open-source Linux. 

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Rekha Pawar - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Qatar University

I would like Oracle Linux to have more frequent updates.

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Daniel_Nemethy - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at Nemethy Moderato Kft

What can improve in the solution is a rather challenging question given that Oracle is pushing towards cloud computing and the closed nature of the system. Maintaining Oracle Linux behind a firewall can be a cumbersome process, as it requires manual intervention to copy repositories and obtain approval from internal authorities. With the current emphasis on cloud computing, the support and development of traditional, closed systems like Oracle Linux may not receive as much attention, leading to potential limitations in the system's capabilities and performance.

My aim is to be in control of the automation process of Oracle Linux, as it holds immense significance for my current work. However, to request that the traditional methods of operation be maintained, as not everyone has the means or access to utilize the public cloud for their services. This is particularly true in my case, where I am operating within a closed system, which is protected by a state firewall and lacks direct internet connectivity. Additionally, I have been unable to find a clear and comprehensive guide or roadmap that addresses how to effectively manage these types of scenarios, as my level of experience in this field is limited.

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RusiPopov - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Paysafe

The Oracle Linux graphical interface could be improved by fixing its occasional freezing on personal home laptops. The Oracle Linux development environment in VirtualBox never freezes.

The service could also be improved if the cost of Oracle support was not so expensive.

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Kevin Honde - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Solution Architect at Econet Wireless Zimbabwe

They don't provide updates.

It could be more secure. They should increase security.

Also, the scalability should be improved.

In the next release, I would like to see it more secure and more usable to adapt to the new technologies that are coming up.

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it_user607413 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle Database Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Desktop environments should be designed better. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's desktop environments are much better.

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SW
Founder at Simpro Tech

Pricing could be improved.

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Devaiss Mohanty - PeerSpot reviewer
Premium Services Sales- CX Professional Services at Cisco

We are not impacted by new releases, because whenever there is a new release, we are informed by our IT team and we prepare accordingly. However, if the number of releases is too frequent you begin to doubt the stability of the system even if it is stable. So if a new release is required, it will be better to consolidate all the features in one release instead of sporadic releases.

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Joonik Jang - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Team Director at BINGGRAE CO LTD

The product's support is expensive. 

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Landry  Mbala - PeerSpot reviewer
Développeur applications at Trust Merchant Bank

I would want Oracle to explore more of Kubernetes and micro services. 

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SA
Manager Assets at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I am not currently able to discuss the products in-depth, as I function at an upper level of management. I will need to consult with my team, who have hands-on experience with the solution. However, one improvement that I would like to see is an upgrade to increase its adaptability with new gadgets such as mobile devices and tablets. The interface should be easy to use. Also, the interface of the tool is a bit old and follows a traditional style.

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Abhishek Kini - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at Retail Insights

The documentation has room for improvement. We have difficulty searching through it for specific information. 

The scalability has room for improvement.

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Lakshmi Prasada Reddy Nandyala - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Techdemocracy LLC

The tool’s user interface needs to improve.

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YA
IT Project Manager at Awash International Bank

The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly for basic users to reduce the time it takes to learn the commands and to reduce the dependencies that come with the OS so the deployment time can be reduced.

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MG
Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There's always room for improvement in the product. 

They could introduce the same level of remote capabilities, which are available with VMware applications to build distant environments. There's still some room for improvement over there.

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DC
Manager, IT at a renewables & environment company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I cannot recall any areas that require improvement, or any missing features I have come across. 

Occasionally, we might get an alert to restart our database, and if we don't do it on our own, the system will do it automatically. That can cause downtime issues if your clients aren't expecting it.

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NP
Sr. System and Storage Administrator at a government with 51-200 employees

The security could always be slightly improved on the product. We'd like it if it was a bit more secure.

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MI
Chief Product Officer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

The network interface should be modernized. It's a bit out of date. 

It could be more scalable. 

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Shrikant Navelkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Clover Infotech

They added a lot of features on Oracle Linux. As a consulting company, and as somebody who's working with customers, obviously the demands from the customers are plenty.

I think they should market it more aggressively now because a lot of people think, "If I have to move from Red Hat Linux to Oracle Linux, it's a migration," when it is not. I call it a movement. You literally can move your large Red Hat Linux to Oracle Linux very simply, there's no migration involved in that. I think they should market these features more aggressively.

One of the things which customers have been asking about is what are the security features that Oracle is going to add. We do a lot of OS hardening, Linux hardening for customers, but I think there should be some tools within Linux where the hardening can be done pretty fast. Now, in this open world Larry Ellison announced, autonomous and self-secured databases, I'm sure those features will come to Linux, and we're looking forward to that.

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HU
Systems Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have no specific technical improvements to suggest, as my experience with the various products was quite satisfactory, however I do have two non-technical suggestions:

  1. My only real criticism of any the products, based on my experience, comes when dealing with ASM volumes and disk groups, and documentation of the Oracle ASM tool specifically. I felt that documentation of its capabilities were somewhat misleading, especially disk and volume tasks that must be performed either by ASMCA or by issuing SQL statements (e.g. version compatibility) to the ASM database directly.
  2. In my observations, if Oracle intends Oracle Linux to be taken seriously as an enterprise operating system outside of Oracle specific implementations, I believe it could exercise more effort in partnering with other software vendors to obtain certification of their products on Oracle Linux. As someone who has performed as a Sr. Systems Engineer implementing Oracle products in an enterprise environment, I find it frustrating to maintain multiple derivatives of the same operating system (e.g. enterprise licensing and maintenance) because some vendors won’t certify on it (or were even aware of its existence), even though it’s almost technically identical. I do recognize there are other factors outside of Oracle’s control in this regard.
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HR
Consultant at Hollomey Consultant GmbH

There were some problems when updating the operating system, which affected the system as a whole.

I would like functioning updates, which make sure that after installing the patches, everything is working as before.

Moreover, there is room for improvement in technical support.

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IK
Project Manager at Closed Joint Stock Company Insurance Company TAS

They should make the solution user-friendly. Also, they should add documentation and video lessons to guide us about its new features. We have a team of specialists who can train us on it, but we need help finding enough information.

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Radhey Rajput - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. IT Analyst at NCR Corporation

Features related to use, feel, and user experience could be improved. It could also have a more user-friendly interface.

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IL
CTO EMEIA at Fujitsu

What we found in moving from Oracle Linux 6 to Oracle Linux 7 was the whole interfacing with the application and the fact that operating had all changed, all the commands had changed. You need to be aware that there is some kind of training, some kind of handover required for your technical guys, understanding different ways of interacting with it. Bear that in mind.

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it_user521934 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see portability to other hardware, such as Dell and Intel platforms, instead of just putting a blinder on only Oracle products or Oracle hardware. The portability is the main challenge, I think. We should be able to port this application to other hardware and other vendors.

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PC
Independent Consultant at Unaikui

Pricing could be improved.

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Faustine Chisasa - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at TZ Telecom Ltd.

For usability, the GUI options during the initial setup could be included with advanced OS tuning and optimization, currently as with most Linux systems that can be done via  CLI.

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it_user660024 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect Senior Principal Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

With many other operating systems, including this one, I would love to have the ability to upgrade the kernel in place. This currently requires a reboot of the OS. With today’s applications and customer needs, having the ability to perform in-place kernel upgrades with no reboots would be huge.

There are some capabilities with Oracle linux to do this, but it is not widely used. KSPLICE can be utilized but there are many features of it such as stack tracing after the fact you may not get what you need and a reboot would still be required. Starting with version 6 you can utilize KSPLICE. Most customers especially hours are hesitant to use such methods like KSPLICE. It does require a higher kernel version (4.x) and many many applications have not yet been supported on that kernel rev that myself and company support.

There is a product you can purchase from cloudlinux called kernelcare. It works well and has fewer nuances. Worth a look for POC at a minimum for any critical business applications. Much like KSPLICE, kernelcare will only work with Oracle linux 6+.

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Tushar Rahatekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Analyst at a maritime company with 10,001+ employees

Performance can always be improved.

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PK
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution could be less costly.

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MA
Technical Presales Consultant/ Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Oracle Linux for Oracle databases is the top. There's no doubt whatsoever. However, if you are going to use it for anything else it's going to be a mess, because many packages will not be supported by Oracle.

For example, I was helping an organization back up various Oracle Linux servers using various kernel versions and various distribution versions. The software that I used for backup requires some packages to be pre-installed into the Oracle Linux machine from the distribution itself, but one of the packages was not available from the Oracle repositories. Because it's a Linux machine, I can manually download this package and install it myself. But the problem with that is that Oracle will void the whole warranty if I install a package from a third-party repository.

If you are going to use Oracle Linux for anything other than running Oracle databases, you will most definitely run into a bottleneck situation in which some packages that are needed, you will not be able to download. And, if you download and install them, you will void your contract, which nullifies the point of you getting Oracle Linux in the first place.

Oracle Linux has a particular use case, not like SUSE, or like Red Hat. 

With SUSE, and Red Hat, you can use them for almost any use case, and you can even install Oracle inside both of them, but you can't do the same with Oracle Linux. 

Oracle Linux is built for Oracle databases. It doesn't make sense for me to get Oracle Linux and install the MySQL database. Even though MySQL is an Oracle product, it doesn't make sense. If I am not going to using Oracle databases then I shouldn't go with Oracle Linux.

Oracle Linux needs to support more packages. I understand that they stripped down CentOS and Red Hat, but Oracle is an organization that will be paying the price of Red Hat making CentOS, CentOS-3 as well.

I understand the idea of making the Linux distribution just optimized for their Oracle database, but I'm not going to get Oracle Linux because it works well only with Oracle products. 

I will most likely have a diverse infrastructure. So instead of going with Oracle Linux, I will go with SUSE Linux or Red Hat. Why? Because Red Hat, for example, has support for many, many packages. Instead of me going to get Oracle Linux for the Oracle database and Red Hat for the remaining workloads, why not get Red Hat from the beginning.

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LR
Fresh Operations Manager at Jerónimo Martins

There needs to be overall better integration.

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CB
Consultant at Agfa Healthcare

Kernel updates.

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it_user8013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Regarding areas for improvement, I think they follow the main kernel filler. The only thing from what I can see as an improvement is the level of adoption in the Linux community because I too often see non-Oracle products at first not being released or not being certified as Oracle Linux. You see more adoption in Red Hat even though they are binary-compatible. You often see that those extras are not directly available on the Oracle download repositories, whereas with Red Hat there is a lot available. And Oracle is quite focused on its own product stack. You can get everything running; everything that you can run on Red Hat you can run on Oracle Linux. However, it is not that integrated. It's no big deal, it takes you a couple of extra commands, but they could spin off more adoption by doing that.

In all honesty, I know that their graphical user interface is very basic, but I think 99.9% of people use it on a server version that doesn't have any display connected to it. Therefore, there's no reason for doing that. I don't see that much improvement specifically for Oracle Linux; I have the same stuff as for Linux in general. There's the adoption of specific drivers as such, but nothing specific for Oracle Linux. I think that they are a very good competitor to Red Hat.

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it_user284961 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Product Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

One of them is because I'm lazy, and most people wouldn't admit that, but when you go from version 6 to version 7 of Linux, a lot of commands changed, and even some file locations have changed. I wish they would keep the compatibility mode, or the stupid mode for me for a couple of years. I hate to learn new commands right away, but it is what it is.

Just keeping up, keeping the pace with the Red Hat main distributions, so if Red Hat's on 7.3, I'd like to see Enterprise Linux on 7.3, at the same time. On one occasion, I think they actually beat Red Hat. I think they came out with their point release first. That's what I would kind of like, is for them to stay very aggressive on that, because kernel modifications typically end up being performance. They have taken the best of Solaris and put it into it. They keep adding tools that are necessary for doing performance optimization and monitoring. It's very mature.

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it_user769608 - PeerSpot reviewer
Alliance Director at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We are still naive, I would say. We need to see as we go there.

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TO
Enterprise Systems Engineer at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We would like to see the cloud setup to be evolved, to allow for setting up of clusters of the operating system for this solution. 

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MW
Project Manager at Realnux

Oracle Linux is almost the same as Red Hat, but it takes a long time to download, in comparison. The download speed is not good. Oracle can improve their servers capacity, especially in Asia.

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it_user611982 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President of Enterprise Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

While the Oracle Linux software is perfectly suited for our needs, the related support processes within Oracle can often be challenging. Having your ticket routed to a capable support engineer can involve several escalations, and there is then a risk that the ticket is transferred to another engineer when the original person’s shift ends, often resulting in a frustrating process of answering many of the same questions again.

Similarly, the time to receive a bug fix can often be longer than in open-source equivalents. Therefore, we always recommend that Oracle Linux implementations are handled with an experienced Oracle Partner, specialized in Linux, who can supplement Oracle’s own support structures with a deeper level of expertise and faster response.

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it_user607410 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Hardware vendors certified by Oracle for installing Oracle Linux are: Dell, HPE and Oracle. The product needs to be certified by more vendors to gain more clients and increase the size of market share.

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it_user418419 - PeerSpot reviewer
Linux System Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

From a product perspective, there needs to be more rapid upstreaming of security fixes released by Red Hat or Fedora.

Free vendor support? There's not much really. And Oracle Linux is feature-poor compared to other Linux distributions, and they're much slower than Red Hat, CentOS, or Amazon to release security patches and bug fixes

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MM
Development Manager at Dxperia

They should improve in the area of entertainment applications for the average user. That includes music, video, and gaming applications.

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AY
Enterprise Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oracle Linux performs best on Linux or Unix. However, you cannot get the same performance or stability in Windows.

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it_user769581 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would say better logging of the bugs. Recently we had an issue and it was extremely painful to find out what the issue was on our platform. Only after three weeks of deep analysis did we find out it was a bug in the kernel of Linux. Maybe something that can help to provide better information on the issue itself.

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EA
Sr. Director, Systems & Databases at GTech
  • Oracle should increase the interaction between Oracle Linux and Oracle RDBMS. (Oracle RDBMS can be packaged into Oracle Linux; a tight integration will bring advantages.)
  • File recovery should be added to Oracle Linux. (When you delete a file, you should recover it easily.)
  • The RDBMS know-how that Oracle has, should be used to also develop Oracle Linux. (Oracle RDBMS has lots of features; why not mimic some of them in the OS tier?)
  • Oracle Linux documentation should be enhanced.
  • Oracle Linux clustering should be enhanced and made widespread. (Oracle should certify it in its products.)
  • We need a file system other than ASM or ACFS. We need a file system which can be used for replication; maybe integrated Oracle databases.
  • We need an Oracle Database-aware GUI but with a consolidated administration console added to the distribution.
  • A GUI-based performance analysis tool should be added to the distribution.
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HP
IT Manager with 1-10 employees

I think the pricing could be improved to be more competitive. I have been using Oracle Linux for a long time. At the moment, I'm trying to expand on our use cases and the GPL license we have is sufficient for that. 

The technical support could be better, as well. 

It would also be great if Oracle Linux had a desktop version. Right now, unline Windows 11 for example, Oracle Linux is server-based only. 

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SU
Master Consultant - RedHat & Oracle Cloud, Virtualization , Automation at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oracle Linux is downstream from Red Hat Linux. This solution has the same pain points. I would probably mention that fleet deployment and management could be improved. 

It would be ideal if they added a faster implementation of the security fixes, if possible.

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FB
Product Development Manager at Greene Waste to Energy

I decided to purchase Oracle Database. I thought that if I bought the product, I would get support. I asked some easy questions to the sales agent who contacted me. He was more interested in selling me the cloud database than answering my questions. I learned that I am too small for Oracle. I continued with CentOS and Postgres. Google provides me with all the information I need. I could not get all the information I needed from Oracle.

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it_user436122 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oracle Linux tends to be a little buggy and sluggish at the virtualization layer. It's been my experience that probably about 85 to 90% of the time certain features are about three-quarters baked. I don't like that.

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RP
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The installation documentation needs to be improved, especially the current installation guide. For example it states that it is needed to format and to store the installation ISO on a DVD, but this is not possible to do in 8.0+ versions, as the ISO files are 7-9GB - greater than 4GB and the regular DVDs do not support it. The actual 8.3 version ISO cannot be put on USB either, as a file  as the setup requires the 9GB ISO also as a file, but this imposes the use of exFAT instead of FAT32, which is not supported by the system boot. Therefore I installed 8.1 from USB, which went just fine and upgraded to 8.3 afterwards with YUM.

My network card is supported by 5.3 kernel (UEK), but not supported by the 4.x RedHat kernel used too, which I had to realize by chance. My video and network cards are not completely supported in the 8.1-8.3 versions, better compatibility with up-to-date hardware is needed. When looking for compatible drivers, there was no clear statement which drivers are supported. Better directions are needed regarding hardware drivers and how to obtain them.

From my experience with Oracle, I completely rely on its documentation and its presence, completeness and reliability was one of the reasons to choose Oracle Linux. The documentation I see worked for 8.1 or 8.2 setups, but not for 8.3. It needs update - Oracle Linux  8.3 changed the installation procedure and doesn't match the documentation. My experience with Oracle is that what is written in the documentation just works. This time it did not help.

The ability to update the look-and-feel of the Desktop UI would be beneficial - the current one is pale to my taste, it is black, grey and white.

They could provide more repositories of tested software, or at least refer to them and comment on their use.

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it_user428364 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Production Support Engineer at a tech consulting company with 10,001+ employees

I have a beef with the installer (Anaconda / Kickstart) on occasion, especially between versions. What I find sometimes is that it has bugs and doesn't work. I have to burn up a lot of time in trying to craft workarounds and getting it to work. It doesn't happen all of the time, but the last couple of versions (7.0, 7.1, 7.2) had some nasty issues where the installer would just simply crash and burn. It's fine as long as the buggy version isn't your only version of choice, in which case, you would be up the creek without a paddle. Oracle need to make sure that their bare-metal installers work, as I don't want to have to debug their code for them.

We could, at some point, benefit from an enterprise-grade Linux solution without paying huge support fees to Red Hat. Besides, Oracle would already have a ready-made investment in people like me for getting Oracle Linux into their existing enterprise customer base. Simply by making it painless for people like me to learn how their stuff work as opposed to Microsoft and RedHat. They want to charge a fortune for the 'privilege' to be taught by them. They don't do this because they already know what I am doing and they are not going to force me to cough up thousands of dollars to learn how their stuff works. They have demonstrated that they are quite confident in their OTN users abilities to learn about their products simply by reading what Oracle has documented and what they have shared about their products. They have given us credit that we are all professionals and that we 'should' all know how to read, write and count to 10.

Now what I don't want to hear from Oracle is "oh, that's what we got from the master source tree from Fedora (or whoever they rely on)." So, I don't care if bugs fell in their lap - don't send those bugs out into the field. I really couldn't care less whose fault it is I just want them to fix it! And if they can't fix it, don't upset the customer by sending out software that they know good and well has issues in it and hope that no one notice. I notice and it only serves to upset us. Oracle needs to keep in mind that although I am an OTN user on their network I am also working with one of their largest customers in their customer base. Oracle doesn't need to forget this fact or take it for granted that I don't work for anyone important so, they need to simply handle all of their OTN users as if each one of us works for a very important customer of theirs.

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MuhammadMwinchande - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at NMB Bank Plc

Oracle Linux could improve by having better compatibility with other solutions. Some aspects of the configuration are difficult. I was using Oracle Linux on a Mac computer and it was very difficult to set up.

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RK
Chief Executive Officer CEO at IT CROWD S.A.S

In the next release, I would like for Autonomous Linux to be available to all users so that the OS administration can be automated.

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MK
Cyber security manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The solution could improve by giving the client or customer more control.

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MS
Manager of Customer Services with 1,001-5,000 employees

The GUI could be made more attractive.

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it_user769575 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I think that the only improvement is staying up with the pace of the technology evolution. As long as Oracle Linux supports all the recent technologies, there are really no more innovations it will need. If the technology itself evolves, as long as Oracle Linux supports it, it's the perfect product.

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MT
Product Lead at Zenotech

Just keeping up to date with the latest releases, so Red Hat Enterprise having Linux 7 compatibility would be useful. Other than that, the tools that we need are there, we use the GCC compilers and those tool chains.

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it_user603813 - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner Consultant at a tech services company

Dynamic tracing could be improved. In Oracle Linux, you have some very powerful (for example "perf" or "systemtap").

If Oracle can deliver such tools like dtrace for linux (publicly), this would help albeit actually dtrace is delivered through the Unbreakable Linux Network.

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it_user436173 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle Database Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oracle's products are quite expensive. The reason why they're expensive is probably the reason why we purchase them, in terms of the stability, and we know that even though we're paying heavily for the product, we can't afford to be going with other inferior products.

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it_user436206 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Applications DBA/UNIX SA at a agriculture with 1,001-5,000 employees

There are some features that might be in Red Hat Linux that aren't in Oracle Linux. I can't think of anything specific, but we had that issue about a month ago.

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MG
Student at Proton

I would prefer to have the KDE Plasma Workspaces interface instead of GNOME.

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SK
senior managed consultant at a tech services company

I hope you have a built-in package to visualize your performance and analysis tools.

I can install and use the open-source tools, but I hope to use the proven packages.

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Moses NYOTA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software and Cloud Engineer at Velocis Technologies LLC

The documentation capabilities could be better. Although it is sufficient, other solutions provide better documentation. 

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it_user769587 - PeerSpot reviewer
IAM Architect at Federal Identity

The kernel could be expanded, a little bit more maximized to work with Kubernetes and the like. That's probably where they are going to go, a little bit more orchestration, system maintenance management.

The ability to do self-diagnostics. Run one command and it runs top head memory, tell me what's going on. The ability for the OS to regulate itself, to do self-diagnostics, so you could take out the UNIX admins and the UNIX supports. Tell me what's really wrong, right now in the OS, what does it look like right now?

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it_user598938 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Operation Engineer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The product is not very different from the market leader Red Hat Linux Operating System.

However, it has some issues when run in a virtualized environment. These NTP and other bugs get worse with the kind of support Oracle provides for Oracle Linux. Oracle support drags out issues and they like to play ping-pong between various teams.

I faced few issues with time sync on Oracle Linux when running on OVM & I had a tough time resolving it with Oracle support.
They could not provide any proper solution & dragged out the issue for a very long time.

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it_user414534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Oracle DBA at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

I think there's a lot of room for improvement. As our business shifts to virtualization and the cloud, the Oracle Linux infrastructure has seen a lot of changes. And even as virtualization consolidates servers and hypervisors have matured and assumed a strategic position within our datacenter, many applications still don't run on hypervisors. Instead, they run on OS's that run on top of hypervisors. This means that in order for there to be a larger impact, there are some improvements that could be made, such as:

  • Optimization of Linux for the virtual environment.
  • Containers. We think that the Linux OS will be a great candidate to host container-packaged application workloads. It's still early in the development process, but we expect Oracle to significantly adopt this technology. Oracle has already started deploying some images using Docker with WebLogic and Storage Cloud.
  • New deployment models. With virtualization, there are now new ways to deploy software, such as with software appliances and the integrated stack of OS and application software. Oracle Linux should be tailored and optimized to run a single application and managed as a single entity.
  • Cloud adoption. With the shift towards cloud application deployments, changes in architecture and delivery model are necessary, which will impact other areas of the datacenter ecosystem.

I'd also like to see Oracle Linux for SPARC. Oracle announced last year the SuperCluster M7, SPARC T7, and SPARC M7 servers, all based on the 32-core, 256-thread M7 microprocessor. If this is supported on Oracle Linux, it will be the first end-to-end implementation of data security in hardware for the Linux foundation. Oracle currently doesn't offer support for Linux for SPARC.

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WS
Manager at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Oracle Linux could improve by having more documentation.

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it_user769605 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Partner at Viscosity North America

I would really like to see more frequent releases and I would like to see a very lightweight kernel for embedded systems. I'm really anticipating the new Oracle Database XE as it relates to Oracle Linux because now I can run that in production, and that was just announced as well.

It's young, so I think it's fair that they have some work to do. A little bit more variability, the ability to expand, take advantage of bare metal. I think that that's really going to be a key as they grow.

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it_user769602 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at SRC.SI sistemske integracije d.o.o.

I think there is always room for improvement. We would like to see new features, we would like to see lots of enhancements, especially in OVM, because Linux is already stable enough and for us it does the job.

In OVM, I think it's hot cloning. I think it's also more analytical capabilities, reporting could be significantly improved, and also SLI dashboards, so that we can follow and monitor SLI more precisely and more profoundly.

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it_user247422 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO/Architect at Viscosity North America

Kubernetes, as I mentioned before, that's coming down soon. 

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RM
Unix System Administrator Ii at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Support could be improved.

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it_user769578 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at Viscosity NA

Overall, Oracle Linux is full of great features and functionality. Because it is an Oracle product, what would be nice is if there better integration between the Linux operating system and Oracle ASM and things like ASMLib and the integration with Oracle RAC.

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it_user82836 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I had some issues going from versions 5 to 6 to 7 because of the change from SysVinit to Upstart to Systemd.

Also, you wouldn't fully replace another Linux product with Oracle Linux. Although it is a full Linux distribution, Oracle Linux is formulated (especially the kernel) for Oracle software and hardware products.

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HL
Interim IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The licensing price could be better. 

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WR
Sales Manager at a healthcare company with 51-200 employees

Areas for improvement would be the manager and the use of case space coordinates.

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it_user486498 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect Hyperion at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Performance and storage could be improved. Dashboard reporting could also be more dynamic, and it would be nice if future versions were easier for users to navigate and drill down into.

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it_user436065 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It would be nice if they could release newer versions quicker. Sometimes we have to wait a while for some new versions to come out with features that we need. You want to be taking advantage of some newer features as soon as possible in order to function better.

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SAMUELMWANGI - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Calidad Systems Limited

The security and integration could improve.

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WK
IT Infrastructure Engineer at a government with 5,001-10,000 employees

The security could improve in the solution.

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it_user656298 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech company

Updates are very slow in our part of world (Slovenia). Now, we use Spacewalk for distribution of updates, but replication to Spacewalk is slow.

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it_user436146 - PeerSpot reviewer
President at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The installation needs some improvements because, as my admins have told me, it's a little bit tedious compared to others. Also, it takes a little bit of time to actually find files, download them, and install them. That kind of goes for anything with Oracle in that unless you know exactly where to go, it can take a bit of time. But once it's installed, it just works.

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it_user418464 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle DBA, Linux system administrator, IT engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Given that it's a distribution for servers and not for gaming, I would like it if useless things like bluetooth were not installed by default. It also needs a better text installation interface.

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KopanoRamaphoi - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Rpc Data

Most day-to-day applications are not native to this solution. You have to run an emulator or virtual machine, such as VMware to access these Windows applications. 

In a feature release, there could be better integration with applications from other operating systems.

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it_user769572 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Some customers feel about Oracle licensing, while it is free, they are not able to understand the support model for it. They feel the price is high for support. 

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it_user417540 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Database Technical Systems Consultant at a tech company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Although Btrfs does a great job, I would like to see ZFS being part of future distributions.

Also, a distributed replicated block device (DRBD) feature would better provide a sort of mirroring over a network of block devices, becoming a superset of Oracle Database Data Guard for a range of applications with storage residing on related block devices.

From another perspective, the adjustments needed for implementing a powerful PPPoE server (PPP over Ethernet) in a similar way, what the guys from Mikrotik (www.mikrotik.com) did for X86 platforms (also starting from Linux kernel) could be interesting. Imagine how secure the connection to related OS using PPPoE would be, the simplicity of routing in the environment, and many more advantages.

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it_user436116 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Right now a lot of people are migrating from traditional Unix to Linux, which performs much better. I'd like to see Oracle continue to improve on the performance of Linux, particularly in regards to scalability, so that we can move completely away from Unix. We'd like to have all our applications on Linux as Unix is fading away.

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SS
Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

The solution needs to improve there their capability with most of the applications.

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it_user860853 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Propositions Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Fujitsu works closely with Oracle's product development team to provide feedback on areas for improvement on behalf of our customers.

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it_user769617 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at C3dna

In terms of improvement, I think actually it is the other way around. Oracle Linux is specially tuned for Oracle Stack, and therefore it works better with the Oracle Stack.

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it_user436125 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Product Dev at a tech company

It needs things like OpenStack and LXC containers, support for Docker and resource manager in Docker. However, this is all in their road map and they have it all covered. Even before I find something lacking, Oracle already knows about it and it will get done.

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it_user899421 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Development Manager

It does not have any reporting on attempted intrusions.

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it_user418443 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

In terms of improvement, from my experience the documentation and resources are not complete and I sometimes have to refer to Red Hat for Linux documentation.

Also, because we use HP servers, the drivers for Oracle Linux are not complete yet.

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JM
DBA Oracle at Timestamp SI

Improve performance and integration with new releases without affecting the ability and stability of the system.

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it_user656313 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oracle Unix/Linux Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

The documentation of the product can be improved. It often lacks a lot of documentation, but so do a lot of Oracle solutions.

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it_user769584 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

What is missing on this operating system, but it's missing on any Linux flavor, are the clustering capabilities of Solaris. The best clustering solution is on Solaris. Having this kind of feature also on the Linux side would be a good idea. 

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it_user181566 - PeerSpot reviewer
OATS Engineer-Onsite Consultant at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We would like Oracle to add more functionality in terms of the GUI. There are more things we'd like to be able to do straight from the GUI itself.

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Buyer's Guide
Oracle Linux
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Oracle Linux. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.