What do you all think of the Red Hat drama a few months ago? I just learned about it and looked into it a bit. I’ve been using Fedora for a while now on my main system, but curious whether you think this will end up affecting it.
My take is that yes, it’s kinda a shitty move to do but I get why RH decided to stop their maintenance given they’re a for profit company.
What do you guys think? Do you still use or would you consider using Fedora?
Yeah? Redhat just backs fedora they don’t own it. Fedora is completely separate and run by the community
I had settled on Fedora but after that debacle I decided to move to OpenSUSE - no complaints there.
There’s plenty of choice, why stick with Red Hat?
I did the same thing, actually. 😅
Ubuntu drama, switched to Fedora
Red Hat drama, switched to OpenSUSE.
But now I have to learn everything because I’m still stuck on APT. I like Zypper and OPI, though. I just wish it wasn’t so freaking slow.
‘sudo zypper ref’ and ‘sudo zypper dup’ (or up on leap) has done the trick for me. It’s a bit slow though true.
Being able to use .rpm files is nice though
Very helpful, will try.
Eh, who used Leap anyhow? Tumbleweed should be used by pretty much any home desktop user
The drama is about Red Hat ENTERPRISE Linux, not about Red Hat Home Desktop Linux.
I personally don’t like what RH did, but their goals were pretty clear and I don’t see how that has anything to do with Fedora. It’s still a very good community project that also provides great value to RH themselves, so I don’t have any fears that they might stop support, start restricting access or interfering with their work.
And I completely agree with how they handled the telemetry thing. Telemetry is important, the way they want to implement it is fine with me, and they discussed it at length with the community.
Enshifitification; now impacting to operating systems too …
At this pace, it could only be worse if they were bought by Broadcom
I’m taking the chance while I can and slowly migrating my lab to Debian
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I don’t think that anything is wrong with Fedora. They are related to RedHat but nothing was changed that affects Fedora, so I’ll continue to use it on a system.
I agree that RedHats changes aren’t good and it might be a bad decision long term, seeing how Suse and Oracle are working on their solution.
Well, I moved away from Fedora with the licensing change and telemetry proposal. It’s a great distro and it’s pretty much the most cohesive experience I’ve had with linux, but those issues have made me wary. We’ll see where they go from here, but for now I’m looking elsewhere.
The problem is that lack of telemetry is one of the reasons why a lot of distros are still not as good as they can possibly be. FOSS should destigmatize telemetry, for innovation’s sake.
What was the Fedora licensing change? Are you talking about the RHEL source code now requiring a subscription?
The RHEL situation, yes.
Seems like a knee jerk reaction to me, but I was using Red Hat Linux 9 (not Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9) in ~2003 when they announced the split to RHEL (paid) and Fedora (community). At the time - I was peeved.
Here we are 20 years later and I just don’t get the feeling any move to encourage/enforce paying on the paid side would greatly impact Fedora.
Now the telemetry thing - I get having a reaction to the headline without context, but I also think they publicly announced it, announced WHY it would be opt-out, explained exactly what would be included (and not) - so if you don’t want it why not just opt out and know that it’s existence clearly helps improve a distro you appear to like?
If you’re using Ansible - disable it there. If you’re a heathen that does everything manually - it’s probably just a checkbox.
In the end - I dont “care” what you use, Linux is great because we all have options, but “rhel licensing change” and “Fedora telemetry” seem like really odd/uninformed reasons to abandon Fedora if you like it.
Cheers either way.
I didn’t know Fedora had telemetry - can it be turned off? It’s important in the FOSS world
At this point it’s a proposal targeting Fedora 40 and the exact implementation is up in the air. It will likely be opt-out, but yes, you could turn it off.
I think last time I installed it asked if I wanted to enable it at the end. By default it’s off.
Yeah I believe the primary problem (from the community) is that the telemetry was proposed to be default opt-out. Meaning the default choice is opted in.
Red-Hat still have an interest to keep it alive, so I still recommend Fedora to people.
It’s definitely not in the open-source spirit, but as long as the interest exists, it still a great distro for both newbies and advanced users.
I’ve found the distro that match my needs, so I won’t use Fedora, for that reason.
I might sound a bit dumb, but could someone tell me what the drama is about and in what way it could affect Fedora?
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There is no justification for this move. Red Hat got seriously rich using FREE LIBRE SOFTWARE and therefore they are BOUND BY THE GPL to freely share and distribute that code.
They got it for free, they have to pass it on for free. That’s the deal with Libre Computing. Yes they can sell their services and no one is infringing on that.
If some companies decide they will use a free clone of Red Hat because that cannot afford the Red Hat fees, that’s their decision. It’s not the fault of the free distro. Chances are that that clone distro also offers paid support, which that user is also not paying for. Which is fine.
Red Hat called the open source community “free loaders” because they reuse the code! WTF?!
That means according to Red Hat YOU are a free loader because you got Fedora for free. You freaking free loader!
And not only you but everyone in the community who gets any distro for free are all free loaders!
Clearly Red Hat have lost the plot and have gone full IBM. I REFUSE to support such a company.
My view is that no one should use Fedora because you are guinea pigs for Red Hat who takes all the improvements Fedora makes and incorporates then into their Enterprise desktop software.
Canonical are not much better. They’ve decided to say “f the users, we will be forcing snaps on everyone”. And the Ubuntu flavours are forbidden from adding flatpak support out the box. Another user hostile move.
Next up: 24.04 will have an all-snaps immutable version alongside the regular ISO. That means they WILL eventually go snaps-only. It’s a matter of time.
So f that too.
I’ve realised that the ONLY way to go is to use Community based distros like Debian, Void, Gentoo, Arch etc. Just move away from all corporate Linux.
Who was responsible for making Linux Subsystem did Windows? Canonical. That was a real dick move against Linux because they reduced it to a simple CLI. As if that’s all Linux is.
Also, having Libre software running inside proprietary software is an offence to the Principles of Libre computing.
Now I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because it’s truly 100% community. And it works great!
IMO Mint will have to drop Ubuntu within the next 2 years and go Debian only. The writing is on the wall.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a good move but you’re wrong hon several places, like:
they are BOUND BY THE GPL to freely share and distribute that code.
No they aren’t. The GPL doesn’t mention anything about price, and they’re only forced to share source code with the people they distribute software to.
They got it for free, they have to pass it on for free
They have paid for plenty of oss code
You’re sadly mistaken. The very principle of Libre is sharing. Like sharing a recipe. You get it from someone for free, you can modify the recipe and you MUST pass it on.
It’s not sharing if you don’t let anyone look at it. That’s the “open source” part - the code must be open for anyone to see and download. That’s the sharing part …
Google “Richard Stallman Libre software”’ and read everything he wrote to bring yourself up to speed.
Linux is not just open source. It’s MORE than that, it’s LIBRE. Huge difference.
Find me where it says you can’t charge or that you have to distribute source code to anyone
Except Redhat maintains a ton of code.
That can be changed. And should be. Let’s take it away from corps and give it back to the community to maintain
What’s the functional difference between the two Linux Mint versions? I’m thinking of switching to Mint as my daily driver even for my gaming pc, wondering if there’s anything I should be concerned about. Honestly I don’t even know the difference between Debian and Mint aside from the desktop environments they come packaged with.
There are essentially no functional differences. The only difference is that the regular Ubuntu based Mint will get a newer kernel at the next major upgrade whereas the Debian based one most likely won’t .
The desktop environment is identical on both.
Ubuntu is based on Debian, with a few additions they add for enterprise. But Mint makes sure both Ubuntu and Debian Edition’s are the same.
I highly recommend Mint whichever version you choose because that Team is excellent. Linux Mint is THE best Linux distro.
I get their POV. Want stability? Then pay, because that’s mostly doable for those who actually need the stability. Fedora is stable enough for others imo, and if that’s a bit too fast for you, maybe try CentOS Stream. Afaik that’s a bit slower than Fedora, but almost right before RHEL in terms of update/change timelines.
I’m in this camp as well - I personally don’t think that the Fedora distro will see much of an impact. From what I can tell, it’s still in their best interest to ensure that Fedora receives the community support that it always has. That said, like I mentioned in the OP, I get why they made this move for the company.
We’ll just have to wait and see whether their Fedora support will continue. The great thing about Linux is the choice, though. So if there ever comes a time where Fedora’s no longer pro consumer, there’s always Arch and Debian.
I’m running the Asahi Fedora remix for personal use in multiple Mac workstations because it’s what the Asahi folks are recommending/supporting right now, and I’m not too bothered. I figured if there are changes impacting Fedora later, Asahi will go back to Arch (which I actually really liked) .
At work I manage somewhere between 20-40 servers depending on workload, almost all running commercial software. More than 50% were running Centos, which is what the software manufacturers supported, when the RH announcement was made.
While I actually understand their reasoning and would happily move to a model where there’s a reasonable cost for those licenses, the way they went about it was way too fast and careless, with huge impact to their potential customers. It ironically undermined my trust on them as a company, and I wouldn’t want to bet my job on anything that’s downstream from or owned by RH right now.
TLDR; Fine with Fedora as a daily driver, wouldn’t touch it for work.
In the process of feeling out mx Linux and endeavor… But don’t necessarily know enough about the red hat stuff to even have an opinion.
Their product offering are worthless to me now than before.
I recently started using a fedora based distro. Specifically bazzite which is one of the read only root distros and a drop in replacement for steam os on deck and PC. In the grand scheme of things I don’t really see the read hat stuff changing much. Canonical does shit the community at large doesn’t like too but people keep using Ubuntu and it’s deranged and deformed babies. I mainly used arch(, btw) for a long time but I really don’t have any attachments to any particular distro and can switch at any time, like I have recently for consistency between my main computers and steam deck.
