Oracle Linux 8 | Support by ProComputers

In my role, I mostly use Oracle Linux  for the VMs where I run my workload. Outside work, I mostly use it to run my own personal workloads, primarily my home lab setup and my own personal applications. I am trying to do the same for my home lab data center as well.

Currently, I run small-scale agents and a few dashboards on Oracle Linux , and then a few of the open-source applications that I use for replacing other proprietary applications. Most of them are containerized. There are a few dashboards that monitor the electrical systems at my home and run the smart devices as well.

I use Oracle Linux mostly from Oracle Cloud . Whenever I spin up a VM for almost any sort of work, I just get Oracle Linux. I have been looking into machine learning recently. Whenever I get an autonomous data center, I usually spin up and run most of the workload, like the compute part or data processing part on Oracle Linux VMs. Recently, I have been trying to spin up my own Kubernetes  clusters as well to self-host it along with the other applications.

The best features Oracle Linux offers in my experience are reliability, the latest updates, and I have never faced any attacks or vulnerabilities on Oracle Linux. It is pretty stable for most of my workloads.

On the reliability side, I have run my home lab on Oracle Linux. I have done it on Ubuntu , then I have tried it on Windows as well for some time, but as far as I know, I have never broken any of my applications after an update on Oracle Linux till now. I have done it on Windows multiple times and a few times on Ubuntu .

Oracle Linux has positively impacted my organization with security, pretty much, because that is where I work on a lot. Oracle Linux is pretty secure and we have not gotten many vulnerabilities being reported from Oracle Linux workloads that we run. Oracle Linux's security has significantly reduced incidents and saved us time because every time a vulnerability shows up in one of our VMs, we would have to take measures to patch it before it can be used. Mostly, this is time-critical. We have SLAs and then we will have to patch it pretty fast, and not having vulnerabilities has saved us a lot of time.

I cannot think of anything as of now regarding improvements needed for Oracle Linux. Everything is pretty good.

A bit on the Oracle Linux user interface side could be improved, but I have not had much of an issue of my own. However, I did hear from a couple of my colleagues that they had certain difficulties on the user interface side.

I have been using Oracle Linux for close to five years now. I started around the middle of my college days, and I have been using it till now, for around five years.

Oracle Linux is pretty stable, really stable.

Oracle Linux has pretty much satisfied almost all our needs as our workloads have grown.

I have tried scaling workloads up or down on Oracle Linux a lot of times, and it is pretty good as of now. It is pretty scalable. I have not found any issues as of now.

Personally, I have not reached out to Oracle Linux customer support myself because there are colleagues who do that, but as far as I know, the customer support is really good.

I would give a rating of 10 for Oracle Linux customer support. However, this is not based on my own personal experience, but rather on that of colleagues.

When I joined this particular company, I have seen Oracle Linux mostly being used. I am not aware of what was there before.

I was not part of the evaluation of Oracle Linux options before choosing it.

This would not come under my area because I am not responsible for measuring it, but I would say that there would definitely be ROI with Oracle Linux in terms of money saved.

I can only comment from a personal point of view regarding Oracle Linux because I do not take care of pricing or the procurement for the company. From a personal point of view, I find it pretty reasonable. It is affordable for me to run my own workloads. Another point being that from Oracle Cloud , the generous free tier that I get there is really good, and then I do purchase certain services for my own purposes. However, I cannot comment for the company because I do not take care of that part.

I would say a solid eight for Oracle Linux overall for now because I still feel there could be so much that can be better. But as of now, a solid eight. It is really good, and I would love to see it getting even better from here.

I would not say I did not give a 10 for Oracle Linux because it is not a 10. I just gave it an eight because I would like to see it way beyond that. If I were to give a 10, then I would want it to be a 12.

Others looking into using Oracle Linux should try it out first and get hands-on experience before making any decisions. Maybe what they read or what they hear might not fully explain what Oracle Linux can do. I suggest that they try it out themselves and then go for it. My overall rating for this review is 8.

We use Oracle Linux  as a RDBMS . For non-RDBMS data sets, we use a different database, but for RDBMS , we use Oracle Linux.

A specific example of how I use Oracle Linux for my RDBMS workloads is saving patient data because we deal with US medical institutes and doctors. Saving patient data, other information, and PII-related information are some basic things that we store. I cannot give you complete context because some things cannot be revealed as we are also under HIPAA compliance.

In terms of my use case with Oracle Linux, performance-wise, it is better compared to other databases. That is why we use this solution.

Oracle Linux offers many excellent features. First of all, there is zero downtime patching, Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, free to use with no mandatory license required, 100% RHEL  binary compatibility, excellent cloud and container support, a strong security stack, and stable long-term support.

Out of those features, the biggest one that has made the most difference for my team and organization is zero downtime patching.

Oracle Linux has a clear positive impact on our organization, both operationally and from a security and compliance standpoint. In summary, Oracle Linux improves our uptime, reduces operational overhead, and allows us to respond faster to security risks without disrupting the business.

Specifically, Oracle Linux has reduced operational overhead and improved uptime significantly. Before Oracle Linux, monthly and quarterly kernel patches were required, typically two patches were necessary, and we needed two to three engineers, which took at least two to four hours per window to address any problem. With Oracle Linux, we have achieved a 60-70% reduction in OS level maintenance effort. What has improved on the uptime and reliability side is that before each kernel patch required a reboot, even with rolling restart. After implementation, kernel and critical CVEs can be patched without a reboot, allowing the system to stay online continuously and avoiding restart-related failures. Oracle Linux has significantly reduced operational overhead by eliminating reboot-based kernel patching. We cut our maintenance effort by over 60% and improved uptime from around 99.9% to near 99.99% with zero outages related to kernel updates after adoption.

Oracle Linux is extremely strong in stability, security, and uptime. However, it can improve in community visibility, cloud-native developer experience, and faster access to newer tooling, especially for teams building a modern Kubernetes-first platform.

While Oracle Linux excels in reliability and security, improving documentation clarity, developer experience, and community visibility would make it even more compelling for modern DevOps teams.

I have noticed that Oracle Linux is very strong operationally, but deeper native observability, Kubernetes-first defaults, and better automation examples would further reduce friction for modern platform teams.

I have been using Oracle Linux for more than five years.

Oracle Linux is highly stable; it is enterprise-tested, has long-term support, and avoids reboot-related instability through live kernel patching.

Oracle Linux scales very well, both vertically and horizontally. It supports large, high-impact systems, scales cleanly across large server fleets and Kubernetes  clusters, and reduces operational friction through live patching and enterprise-grade features.

Oracle Linux customer support is solid and enterprise-grade, especially for production and mission-critical workloads.

We switched from CentOS  and RHEL  mainly to eliminate reboot-driven downtime and reduce operational overhead while keeping full RHEL compatibility and lowering overall costs.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that Oracle Linux gave us enterprise-grade capabilities with a much simpler and more cost-effective licensing model while keeping setup and migration effort very low.

I have seen a return on investment as Oracle Linux reduced OS maintenance effort by over 60%, improved uptime to near four nines for infrastructure-related work, and allowed us to scale without increasing headcount, delivering a clear operational ROI.

Before choosing Oracle Linux, we evaluated RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux , and Ubuntu , but chose Oracle Linux because it uniquely combined RHEL compatibility with zero downtime patching and lower operational costs.

My advice to others looking into using Oracle Linux is that if uptime, security, and predictable operations matter more than chasing the latest feature, Oracle Linux is a very solid choice. I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

We use Oracle Linux  as the OS since we are into OKE, the Kubernetes  engine of Oracle, and it's a managed AMI provided by Oracle. That's the default choice.

We use Oracle Linux  in a solution which is in VDI , Virtual Desktop  Infrastructure that we provide to our customers and that is the base image that we provide to our customers.

Since the use case for us is pretty much with OKE, Oracle Linux has been a good thing for us. Since it's optimized and managed, we wouldn't have to manage it as much; our workload reduces since it's a managed thing.

I wouldn't say it's specifically an Oracle Linux pro, but when using Oracle Linux with a Kubernetes  engine, it provides you with all the necessary libraries that it needs for a startup. This means quicker startup time and quicker joining to the cluster. It's just fast when you use Oracle Linux because it's optimized for your OKE engine.

When I mention quicker startup time and easier joining to the cluster, it means you have a pretty good startup when you want to scale, you don't have to wait longer times just for your nodes to come up. When you have your traffic spiking, you don't want to wait that two to three minutes extra for a node to join the cluster, so that's where you have that advantage. And even for the customers when we give them access, it's a better startup since it's optimized and has all the necessary libraries.

When I mention our workload is reduced because it's managed and optimized, it is approximately 80 to 90 percent of our workload is reduced because Kubernetes also releases frequent updates. You don't have to migrate to a new one; when you're migrating, it's pretty quick. All the security patches are handled by Oracle. The newer updates are provided by Oracle, and you don't have to test it. You will need to do some rounds of testing, but way less than managing your own Linux.

From the performance perspective, Oracle Linux could be improved. I have even worked in Amazon Linux , and I do tend to feel that when running on the same instance, other Linux distros tend to perform better than Oracle Linux, even if you do a side-by-side comparison of Amazon Linux  and Oracle Linux. I would definitely lean into Amazon Linux.

I don't have insights on the exact specification where Oracle Linux lacks, but when you're SSHed in connected to your machine, you just feel that it's a bit slower. It's kind of laggy compared to your other experience in Amazon.

It's been around one year that we use Oracle Linux in our Kubernetes environment.

We haven't seen any issues with Oracle Linux that have caused downtime or any significant performance issue as of now.

Oracle Linux is stable for our workloads. We haven't faced any major issue.

Oracle Linux is pretty much scalable. We run a thousand-node cluster with around 8,000 to 9,000 pods running in a cluster, and we have 10 to 15 clusters that we are already running. We are planning to scale it to 40 or 50 clusters as and when customers get onboarded, and till now, it's been kind of stable; we haven't seen any issues with the scale.

The customer support for Oracle Linux, coming from an AWS  perspective, is absolute garbage. They have free support and paid enterprise support, but both of them haven't been that great for us. It's not that supportive because AWS  support was way better than what we are experiencing from OCI .

We were using Amazon Web Services (AWS) before switching to Oracle Linux. It was majorly from a cost perspective that we wanted to switch to Oracle because the compute is a lot cheaper in OCI  when compared to AWS.

Since we have migrated our workload to Oracle, we do see significant savings in our cost. We measure it from per user cost since we have a virtual desktop infrastructure that we provide to our customers. We had in AWS around 415 per user, so that would be around 400 INR per user in AWS, and post using Oracle, we have reduced it to around 300 INR. So it's a significant drop in the cost.

We do find Oracle Linux cost-effective because we have been integrated into their OKE ecosystem, so we feel we're getting good value.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is pretty straightforward and it's low cost compared to any other cloud providers out there. Oracle is way too cheap compared to them.

We pretty much stick to Oracle Linux because it was a managed service, so we stuck to that. We didn't explore much on other distros.

There's nothing specific about our use case with Oracle Linux.

It's pretty much in terms of any other Linux, so there's nothing too great that Oracle Linux can flex on. It's just a typical Linux.

Other than that, I don't see any other positive impacts from a sole purpose of Linux. Something out of the box that other Linux providers are not providing, I don't see any such thing in Oracle Linux.

When I mention our workload is reduced because it's managed and optimized, it is approximately 80 to 90 percent of our workload is reduced because Kubernetes also releases frequent updates. You don't have to migrate to a new one; when you're migrating, it's pretty quick. All the security patches are handled by Oracle. The newer updates are provided by Oracle, and you don't have to test it. You will need to do some rounds of testing, but way less than managing your own Linux.

It's pretty much optimized for their Kubernetes engine. That's the whole point. So it's pretty good when you are in their ecosystem and you're using their own Linux. But when it comes to Linux, I do feel there are way better options to choose from instead of Oracle Linux.

I don't have much info on the security perspective because I don't handle that. But whatever I have seen, there's not much work that my organization does from a security standpoint for managed Oracle Linux.

We are in the Oracle ecosystem, so I haven't felt any hiccups integrating Oracle Linux with their services because they own the environment. I haven't seen such hiccups where their own service is not able to integrate smoothly.

I haven't gone through Oracle Linux documentation specifically, but Oracle docs are a little bit messy and a bit difficult to find, sometimes even ambiguous.

The same command line system prompts that you would give to Amazon Linux are applicable, so the migration was pretty smooth when we went from Amazon Linux to Oracle Linux since we were changing the cloud providers.

Specifically for Oracle Cloud  Infrastructure, if you want cheap compute and you want to run some non-impacting workloads and batch workloads, I think that is where OCI would shine where you would be reducing costs significantly.

I would rate this review as an 8 out of 10.

I use Oracle Linux  for system operation, where I create files and utilize scripts as part of my everyday work with this operating system. I use the virtual machine with Oracle Linux  as my everyday solution, as the virtual machine's typical uses include navigating and having a machine because it is faster, and Oracle Linux is more secure than Windows. For that reason, I use Oracle Linux server in my job at the bank.

The best features Oracle Linux offers include security, which is vital because we have important files that we cannot share with others, and performance, as it is faster. The bank uses it because the performance is better than Windows; it is faster to create files, move them, and retrieve files from Cobol, which are just some examples.

I cannot download some files from any website because the antivirus detects them, and I also cannot upload certain things in my virtual machine due to restrictions; that is an example of the security feature that it has.

The efficient security is a positive impact Oracle Linux has had on my organization, as that is the main aspect I notice. I do not work in the security sector at the bank, but I use it for my operating system.

I think the majority of the things that Oracle Linux provides for my job are good. I also want to mention that Oracle Linux interface is very well-designed because it is similar to Windows, but that is not a feature; it is just a good recommendation.

I choose a nine instead of a ten because I do not think it is the perfect operating system; I consider that there are a lot of better options. In my personal case, I prefer Linux Mint because I appreciate the interface, and it is lighter than Oracle Linux. Additionally, Oracle Linux is sometimes complex to install, and when I use it for my personal needs, I encounter some conflicts, so that is a small thing that I have to share.

In the bank, I use Oracle Linux server as my virtual machine, and I have been working with this for about two years.

Oracle Linux is stable in my experience, and I do not have any complaints during the time that I have used it.

I think Oracle Linux can handle growth as it depends on all your necessities, but its scalability is easily managed.

I do not know about the customer support for Oracle Linux since I work with on-premises services, so the people working in the bank provide the support.

I think Oracle Linux is the main option that the bank evaluated before choosing it.

That is the principle for the bank regarding how we use Oracle Linux, and we do not have a preference because that is the rule in the bank.

Oracle Linux is deployed as on-premises services in my organization because I have to log in with the virtual machine from Windows.

The environment for Oracle Linux is installed on-premises services instead of being hosted in a cloud environment like Google Cloud , AWS , or something else.

I think that there is not a business relationship with the vendor other than being a customer.

In my personal case, I prefer using Linux Mint and other lighter operating systems because I do not have good performance on my computer, but I think Oracle Linux is the main solution the bank chose for work.

When I say efficiency, I mean that Oracle Linux helps me work faster, especially in developments; I work as a data engineer, and I need a faster operating system, which Oracle Linux provides me as I have to upload a lot of big data, and that is very useful.

I think Oracle Linux is a good option for organizations; in personal cases, there are a lot of better options, but for organizational companies, it is good for scalability, performance, and security.

I gave this product a rating of nine out of ten.

My main use case for Oracle Linux  is as a system administrator. A specific example of how I use Oracle Linux  in my day-to-day work is supporting users and solving their issues.

The best features Oracle Linux offers are that it is easy to use. Once you have learned Oracle Linux, it is easy to teach others, and any other system has a help button. Oracle Linux has positively impacted my organization because it is a great tool and great software. It is efficient, for sure, and definitely provides cost savings, which are specific outcomes I have noticed in my organization since using Oracle Linux.

Oracle Linux improves every quarter with their enhancements. Fixing bugs quicker is something I wish they would focus on next. Getting their bugs resolved quicker is my primary concern regarding needed improvements.

I have been using Oracle Linux for 10 years.

I find Oracle Linux very stable.

Oracle Linux's scalability is very, very good.

Oracle Linux's customer support system is very good. Getting their bugs resolved quicker is an issue I have.

We had an in-house system before and switched to Oracle Linux.

I have seen a return on investment because definitely fewer employees were needed, time was saved, and we spent considerable money.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the pricing was high.

Oracle Linux is a great tool, and I would give this advice to others looking into using it. I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.