Re: flame on
I've been playing with RHEL 7 since the first public beta and have just finished migrating all of my servers from RHEL 6.5 to 7.0 (I typically try and coincide hardware and OS upgrades so these were all clean installs on fresh hardware). So far so good.
Having said that, yeah, RHEL moving to systemd was quite an annoyance. Admittedly I haven't actually run into any systemd-specific issues yet and half of my gripes really boil down to me having been deeply rooted into playing with init scripts while the other half being the well-documented nature of the systemd devs (after Linus went on a big rant against one of said devs quite a number of other individuals also expressed their displeasure with the way the systemd maintainers handle bugs).
The only issues I've had with RHEL 7.0 to date were all installer related. Anaconda kept crashing at random and the interface with its nonsensical tab order was aggravating to navigate keyboard-only (especially when choosing NOT to have your partitions automatically created for you). Which really does suck as I typically do not have a mouse on hand when working on my RHEL systems. At times the installer would initialize not detecting one or more of my network interfaces. Other times it would simply crash when navigating from one menu to another.
Really. Here's a piece of advice to anyone installing RHEL 7.0; get out of the installer ASAP. Go in, partition your arrays, and get out (sticking to the standard minimal install). Which is what I usually do but I do at times like to also quickly get my hostname, network interfaces and clock configured.
Annoyingly the RHEL 7.0 installer also seems to omit some options which I am quite adamant were in the RHEL 6.x installers. You no longer have the option of configuring a boot-loader password during install and neither are you asked whether or not you want your clock to be UTC. Minor issues but annoying nonetheless as it just adds onto the number of config files I need to dig into post-install.
Once I'm out of the bloody installer though it's all smiles. Happy to have finally moved onto newer revisions of numerous packages. It really is frustrating when you're left out on new and useful features because you're a number of versions behind... and I really try to stick with the standard/optional RHEL packages on my mission critical systems in order to ensure hassle-free updates.