I think it will be fine, but I’d personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
…for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It’s always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It’s amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you’ve read cringely, you’ll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it’s hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it’s been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
Fedora is community owned, it’s just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don’t really think there’s a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
I suffer with systemd
What’s the problem?
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don’t know much about KDE at all.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 1•1 year ago
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.
I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
Single users really don’t need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it’s not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you’re a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
I’ve broken my install so much that I can have everything set up in 15 min on a new machine. I just wish I didn’t have to bother or know that.
I don’t care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.
If the time comes, that Fedora doesn’t fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
Not worried at all, I’ve moved on many years ago.
I think it’s too big to fail, but it killed personally interest for me for some time.
Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
It inspired me to move on. I’m running OpenSUSE now. I don’t really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I’m out.
I switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don’t regret it until now.
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole “Opt-out” telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and “open” nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for “Opt-out only” telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I’ve done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
Very
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I’m not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.