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.
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
If everyone thought like that we wouldn’t be on Lemmy.
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.
No need to rawhide, Fedora already breaks all by itself every now and then.
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.
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
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.
Here is another one to switch to: Gentoo
How could I forget? Thanks. And Slackware, to date myself here.
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.
@corsicanguppy @Raphael Fedora is the beta testing platform for RHEL. Redhat will not cut them out.
They just announced CentOS is the beta platform.
