I left Ubuntu when they sent all my dock search history to Amazon. But this time is different, should I leave Fedora considering how much it is developed by Red Hat?
I’ve actively defended this distribution and Red Hat for many years now and I’m deep in their technology but I want to avoid being a Devil’s Advocate.
EDIT: I decided to give it some more time, I’ll stay on Kinoite for now, if Red Hat’s IBMfication reaches Fedora, I’ll switch to Debian assuming we don’t have a high quality immutable replacement by then. I’ve been on /r/opensuse and read rbrownsuse’s posts enough times to know MicroOS KDE is NOT a good suggestion, their rebranding doesn’t clean up their history.
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.
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.
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
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
archinstallnowThis. 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
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
Of the mainstream ones definitely. Otherwise there are some indepedent distros where that wouldn’t happen.
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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 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’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.
Fedora is 100% community supported. Red Hat is the primary sponsor and offers infrastructure and funding for the project, as well as full-time employees, but that’s the extent of the relationship. Red Hat doesn’t have decision-making powers. The project’s ideals force it to be open and transparent. So, if you are happy with it, stay with it. Red Hat only sponsors the Project. They don’t make decisions for the Project
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.
@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…
i just installed Kinoite on my laptop and I really like this distro feels very solid and snappy. i might just do ostree-rpm to rawhide to be on the latest of it at some point.
