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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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You should use Debian.
Or Ubuntu if you need long term support, private or corporate, for example. Free 10-year support for up to 5 machines is no joke in my book. They no longer send search results to Amazon. 🥲 If they start again, you can always migrate back to Debian without huge difficulty.
Absolutely. Debian is the only distribution that’s truly safe from a corporate takeover. Some people call their strict governance model onerous, I call it necessary.
Here to second this! I highly respect the Fedora community and their distribution, it is awesome work and an awesome platform. Still, when I think long term, I want to run an OS w/o cooperate ties, because all Linux distributions with cooperate ties did shitty things against the community eventually. Your time is not free and life is short - so Debian is one of the few save technology investments you can make at this time IMHO.
Would you say the for Gentoo?
Of the mainstream ones definitely. Otherwise there are some indepedent distros where that wouldn't happen.
There is literally zero practical reason to switch, so no one can answer that question without getting into your head and weighing the inconvenience of switching a distro against the ideological fervor and satisfaction you gain from showing those evil capitalists at Red Hat that you won't tolerate their actions by... switching off an almost entirely unrelated distro.
Personally I won't be switching away from Fedora for the foreseeable future, and think that you and half the people in this thread are being more than a little silly.
edit: Also, "now that"? This move is completely in line with Red Hat's behaviour for the past like 20 years. It will also quite literally affect nothing else but the existence of RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky, because virtually all the code and work that goes into RHEL is still upstreamed, and RHEL sources will still continue, in practice, to be publicly available, just with some delay.
If you can switch, switch.
If you can't switch, wait until Fedora is forked to a new project, which is inevitable at this point given how dependent Fedora is on Red Hat for governance (source: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/), and it seems that Red Hat no longer wants Fedora (source: recent pivoting away from the community, and laying off the Fedora project lead in May and terminating the position).
I expect within a few years, you will be able to just change repositories and a signing key, and load whatever community-based Freedora replaces it.
I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.
Arch, Debian, EndeavourOS, Solus, NixOS are community driven and unlikely to have some kind of corporate/hostile takeover.
Can you elaborate on SuSE being hostile towards open source?
About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux's growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft's intellectual property and potentially sue them.
As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, "Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation."
So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for "protection" from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren't playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.
This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn't be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer -- smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.
In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft's aggressive behavior a decade earlier.
Wow, what a story! It ties so many apparently distant things together
I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.
That's disappointing to hear. openSuSE is pretty much my go to to recommend new people exactly because from my experience with it it is well maintained but not entangled too much in corporate bullshit. What have they done?
Seconding Endeavour - Gives you all the benefits of Arch (the wiki, the freakin AUR) without so much of the... Assembly required part. They give you a desktop, a web browser and a firewall and you're off to the races. A perfect in between, IMO.
Arch Linux has archinstall now
This. No diss to Endeavour, but Arch is just as easy using Archinstall
The problem is honestly Arch Linux isn't missing anything or doing anything wrong that requires a forked distro (except for being hard to install). I loved Manjaro and the Manjaro community too, but at the end of the day it really just doesn't sell anything besides an installer
Here is another one to switch to: Gentoo
How could I forget? Thanks. And Slackware, to date myself here.
I don't think that Fedora will be affected by the changes RedHat has made with RHEL in the near future. It's still a Community Distro. So there is no need to switch right now.
I'm using Silverblue currently, but i'm thinking about hopping to VanillaOS when they switch to Debian as a Base.
Fedora is 100% community distribution with Red Hat as a sponsor and large contributor. Fedora will always be 100% free and open-source and will never charge to make source-code available if that concerns people. This reflects heavily on their Freedom foundation: “[…] a completely free project that anyone can emulate or copy in whole or in part for their own purposes.”
Red Hat may have a grip on resources and funding for the project, but neither IBM nor Red Hat have ultimate decision-making powers.
just use a community-lead or non-profit foundation lead distro: NixOS (better than silverblue/kinoite in all aspects they try to sell), Arch, or Debian.
For professional usage, you generally go Ubuntu, or some RHEL derivative.
Depends on how your your perspective on this is: I don't think this will affect the distro at all, development and maintenance will probably continue as is and you as the user will not feel any difference...
But if you don't want to use any of their projects anymore, you should switch, yes. But don't think you somehow "hurt or harm" them by "boycotting" fedora. Since you don't pay anything for fedora, you do not provide them any revenue by using it, therefore you are not taking any possible source of income away by NOT using it anymore.
You switching to another distro will change only what you use and nothing in the big picture. So it's 100% up to you with literally zero external factors to consider.... atleast imho
Insert astronaut "always has been" meme. This was totally predictable once they started embrace/extend/extinguish by forcing through systemd.
Yes, you should try Debian, Arch or NixOS.
Debian is so incredibly different from the other three. I honestly don’t really understand why so many people seem to consider that switch.
I’m currently on Silverblue and I love the image based system they’ve got going. So if I’d switch, OpenSuse MicroOS is high on my list. Otherwise NixOS or Arch would be an option as well. Maybe Arch given the amount of users (which typically means slightly better support with bigger changes of things having been tested against it)
I feel like this is what it finally took to push me to Arch. I absolutely love Fedora too. I don't mind Redhat as an entity making money for their employees. What I do mind is insulting their users and having another megacorp like IBM make these actual decisions.
It’s honestly hard to say. Pretty much only pure vanilla Debian hasn’t done something I disliked. Okay well except the whole “systemd will not be a thing” ordeal before they changed their minds on that. I think you should wait and see, because RHEL is the original RPM based distro they all stem off of. Companies are just doing everything they can to stay afloat, which results in shitty feeling decisions like this.
Companies are just doing everything they can to stay afloat, which results in shitty feeling decisions like this.
Are we still talking about IBM and his ridiculous amount of capital ?
If u don't like it change red hat to anything else, I'm not happy with them trying to put open code behind a paywall, and how they r calling us leeches eveb when the community has developed a lot of tools for the ecosystem. Even tough they r somewhat a little behind trends (and development ) I have been with debian for a reason, like how they still support older platforms.
If you don't like systemd but still want to use Debian, try Devuan.
Pretty much only pure vanilla Debian hasn’t done something I disliked.
You probably are only considering the top 3 Linux distros or something? There are a lot of independent distros out there that have never disappointed me. They tend to be noncommercial (the commercial incentive is what ultimately kills a distro.)
If you're strongly tied to KDE and immutability, then I would say no. There's not really an equivalent distro that provides stable immutability with a solid KDE/Plasma experience.
If you're tied to immutability, but not KDE, then I recommend openSUSE Aeon. It's Gnome, but with a few extensions, feels great as a KDE replacement. openSUSE Kalpa (KDE) exists, but is in a very rough alpha state and was mostly unusable for my purposes.
If you're tied to KDE and not immutability, then I recommend really any other distro. Can't go wrong with Arch, Nix, or even Debian if you don't mind slightly outdated packages (and that might be false now, I believe it just had a big release?).
For anyone wondering openSUSE Aeon = MicroOS. They renamed it in May.
I was on Debian before switching to Fedora. I might go back but keep my exact same workflow. Installing everything with flatpaks and not doing any changes to the base image.
I'd never use a distribution that depends on some type of for-profit company in first place.
I just finished watching Jay's opinion on this very topic before I read your post. He makes some compelling points: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fqfyM7zE6KM
Having worked for many very large corporations in my day, I observe that no "company" can have any more integrity than the leadership in that company and the larger the company, the more leadership there is (boards of directors, shareholders, c-suite execs, etc). The more leadership, the less integrity because there isn't a single rudder guiding the ship. So, I believe nothing said by any large company because the person saying it is nothing more than the voice for that company at that particular minute and it's anyone's guess the machinations going on behind the curtain, which can and will change depending upon profitability and political goals from quarter-to-quarter. It can be no other way in large organizations (including companies, governments, tribes, etc). With smaller companies/projects, the product or service is much more likely to stick with a principal or goal because there's fewer chefs in the kitchen and the person speaking for the team is more likely to exercise integrity because they can. When I say integrity, my definition in this context is "aligning actions with words." So my take is there is a risk with hitching your wagon to any distro because larger orgs have more resources but are less likely to exercise transparency but smaller projects may have the transparency but not the resources.
I've been using Pop! for a few years and it's a small company (System76) with obvious goals to grow, which is certainly something to be cautious of because nearly every company loses their original principals when they begin striving for growth over convictions. I've been running Fedora in several VM's and I'm not planning to change that until IBM decides to pee in that project's bathwater too.
I am sticking around for the time being. While it is a community project, Red Hat is still the legal entity representing it and is a sponsor of the Fedora Project. I am confident that Fedora will continue to exist (or if RedHat ruins it, the community would fork it), consequently I feel that this is more a question of morals / ethics or desire to distance oneself from Red Hat products. With switching you would likely be giving up either KDE or immutability, until OpenSUSE's Kalpa matures more. Regardless, I'm not sure how much benefit Red Hat gets from you being a Fedora user. Unless you contribute to the project itself or are using Fedora as a means to gain more knowledge for using RHEL products in enterprise.
Some relevant articles for people interested; Fedora Project Wikipedia governance section, Fedora Project Wiki regarding the proposed "Foundation" and the mailing list discussing the "Foundation".
I'm writing this from Kalpa. What is immature about it?
I have not personally tried it, but here they describe it as being alpha software.
Of course, that alpha designation could be unwarranted, I do not know.
The question is where would you go ? Assuming you want to keep the immutability.
OpenSUSE! Aeon, to be specific. (Used to be MicroOS)
That's a personal decision and will depend on how you feel about using Fedora now. If you do decide to change have a look at openSUSE Kalpa, an immutable KDE based distro.
I'd wait and see, personally. Maybe make a test install of Debian stable and play around with it.
A good part of the fedora immutable spins that they are just base systems for running flatpak apps and if you use apps as flatpaks what distro to use as a base system doesn't matter much. Even immutability is not such a big deal as the separation between the base system and the applications. It is less about tech and more about usage habits.
As a flatpak user I can call myself a distro nomad. I've switched from Silverblue to Debian now. If you use Kinoite you can try KDE Neon + flatpaks or openSUSE Kalpa (their immutable variant with KDE).
I'd say it's all up to whether your desire to distance yourself from Red Hat and it's distros is great enough to be worth the effort of backing things up and re-installing everything. If you feel better using something that isn't made by Red Hat after what's been happening, then switch. If you feel like the effort to switch from something you are already deep into using isn't quite worth it, then there's no issue in sticking with it.
You can probably try openSUSE Kalpa.
You don't need to leave Fedora.
RH will just cut them out soon enough, if you believe the trends.
Best have a plan to move on FROM them, though. Look into parallel porting to PCLinuxOS for now, as it's a VERY similar maintenance routine, and it has a very wide app support window. Their unattended install (ie packer for vagrant or ovirt) is absolute ass, but that's their achilles heel. Ultimately, that may not be a problem for you.
I'd direct you to the PCL/OS lemmy sub, but I think there is none yet.
@Raphael I personally recommend Debian. Never had any shit from Debian, and with the recent release of Debian 12, it's now better than ever. Now's actually the perfect time to switch to Debian....
To me, it really doesn't feel like you need to switch unless you're actually being affected by this in some way. Fedora isn't actually Red Hat, they're just sponsored by them and assisted by them in other ways because Red Hat uses them as an upstream, but the worst case scenario that I know of, is simply that Red Hat will cut ties with Fedora.