this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
288 points (96.8% liked)

Linux

47290 readers
2358 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] beta_tester@lemmy.ml 62 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Does that mean I should stop recommending people fedora with gnome?

I'm still confused about its future

[–] OverfedRaccoon@lemm.ee 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

After 3 years on Fedora, the distro that finally made me stop hopping, I moved to openSUSE when I installed a new SSD. I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm good with switching now when convenient rather than later.

[–] BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

so… how do you like openSuSE after 3 years of fedora?

[–] OverfedRaccoon@lemm.ee 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Coming from Fedora/Cinnamon, I went with Tumbleweed/Plasma. As dumb as it sounds, checking out those "X things to do after installing openSUSE Tumbleweed" articles really helps get the ball rolling with adding the Packman repo, using opi for codecs, installing MS Fonts for compatibility, and other basic quality-of-life things like that. YaST does a lot of heavy lifting and hand holding, which can be good or bad depending on your Linux journey, experience, and/or philosophy - but it is very convenient. Honestly, like with anything Linux, you just kind of adjust til you find things you don't like - which, to be honest, my main list of things is less with openSUSE itself and more with KDE Plasma.

I guess that's a long way to say, I've been fine and haven't missed Fedora.

[–] sharedburdens@hexbear.net 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm probably going to be switching from fedora too, what were your issues with KDE plasma?

[–] OverfedRaccoon@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing broken or nonfunctional or anything. I've just been more of a fan of Cinnamon (and Xfce before that). I hadn't tried Plasma in any real capacity in years, so figured I'd see where it's at now; it's fine. So they're more complaints than issues - "old man yells at cloud"-type stuff because I have to figure out everything again, which is frustrating when you have a workflow.

[–] sharedburdens@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

Oh that's good to hear- I'll have to give it a shot!

Good excuse to clean house anyways

[–] pgetsos@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

Having done the same trip (years of Fedora, then OpenSUSE) I'm super happy with my experience

[–] dandroid@dandroid.app 5 points 1 year ago

Not OP, but I used Ubuntu for years and just installed OpenSUSE on my laptop last week. I really like Plasma compared to Gnome. The package manager repos needed a lot more configuring on openSUSE compared to Ubuntu, as there were a lot of software not available in the default repos. Things like my graphics drivers for my dedicated GPU needed a repo added. I also like apt a lot more than zypper. Zypper seems to complain about incompatibilities a lot, and it's much slower. OpenSUSE has far more up to date packages than Ubuntu, which was the main reason I switched. I also really like btrfs and snapshotting built in. I haven't figured out Yast yet. It seems confusing to me. I prefer to set configs from command line.

Once I had everything set up though, I can't really tell the difference, which is ideal.

[–] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sadly, this move by Red Hat is not unexpected. Personally, I do not recommend any Red Hat related distros, including clones. This breaks my heart since my first Linux experience was Red Hat Halloween, but the company is just taking ugly turn after ugly turn.

[–] user8e8f87c@berlin.social 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@beta_tester @alounoz No, Fedora is independent and all Gnome is affected by this. It is very sad that RH is not interested in the Linux Desktop and I doubt that Canonical will assign resources to these projects.

[–] digdilem@feddit.uk 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

"independent" - Is it though?

Redhat are the major sponsors of Fedora, much as they sponsored Centos before taking it over and killing it in classic "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

I have doubts about the future of the entire EL ecosphere - I know not many enterprise level organisations are investing deeply into it right now, whether that's with RHEL or a rebuild. Too much doubt about Redhat's intentions with RHEL and the future of it.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

Hard to “embrace” something you created. Fedora is 100% a Red Hat creation. They created Fedora when they created RHEL. Before that, it was just Red Hat Linux.

[–] DangerMouse@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Fedora users are just "beta testers" for Red Hat's main distro, RHEL, and it really did feel like it. I started on Fedora and moved on swiftly after finding better distros.

[–] AProfessional@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It is dependent in many ways but they can and do make independent decisions.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Independent then why did the RH lawyers make them remove the codecs from the distro earlier this year.

[–] cobra89@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Because Red Hat is a distributor and sponsor of Fedora. The Fedora project is made up of around 30% Red Hat employees. This makes them liable if Fedora starts shipping codecs that are in violation of patent law.

OpenSuse also removed the codecs and they aren't affiliated with Red Hat at all.

[–] alounoz@lemm.ee 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m also not sure about it, as I’ve always liked Fedora.

However, these news impact the whole Linux desktop, and GNOME in particular :(

[–] garam@lemmy.my.id 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are focusing on consolidating flatpak, and move toward immutable desktop. If you read the some press release in red hat blogs, they move their teams to make Wayland more stable now, and they aim to bring full flegede gaming desktop also 3D tools as most Hollywood company use RHEL on desktop for processing, it's what some of the engineer said on reddit, and libreoffice, rythmbox, totem, bluetooth, are offered with flatpak, so... User can move to that.

Sadly their way of communicating always bad when they move to new project these days.. Really bad..

And some other are making FUD on those news with community left confused and make assumptions..

[–] alounoz@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

However, this is not about dropping RPM in support of Flatpak. In this case, they asked an upstream maintainer to reduce their involvement. And it’s not FUD: it’s written in the blog post itself.

[–] garam@lemmy.my.id 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah. But red hat already say it first, that it need to focus on other part of desktop for Wayland.

There are trade off when you are moving resources, and Red Hat do it for free..

So why I called it FUD, because they talk because they don't know the chronology...

And for the post from Red Hat Engineer, I know they don't like it, but Wayland need more focus also 3D part as it's core part of Red Hat business and for greater masses.. You can't have shinny thing sucking out people or corporation without win win benefit.. And the engineer are employed by red hat.... That's it.

[–] Pat@kbin.run 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

openSUSE will welcome you and your friends :)

[–] beta_tester@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

I switched from openSUSE to fedora, and currently fedora is the perfect distro for me.

[–] bitwolf@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago

Fedora exists separately from RHEL. RedHats decisions can only affect it so far as the directions developers go in.

However the community votes in which tech is included in Fedora. I wouldn't worry about the distro.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is these companies are the bulk of the contributors to these projects.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Yep. People think it's people in their spare time. I mean people have to eat and these companies are the ones who pay for most of the development.

[–] barusu@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I loved fedora and it is not easy to choose another distro that fits me that well, but I more and more loose trust in fedora and its future. I think I'll switch from fedora to a real community distro w/o corporation influence, step by step box by box, slowly but steady to get back my peace of mind.

[–] BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolutely. This is the end-result of all corporate backed distros.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fedora should be dropped try a community distro not a corporate one.

[–] jumper775@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Fedora is a community distro. Red hat just contributes a lot.

[–] taanegl@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is the contentious part and also why I left Fedora.

Don't get me wrong, you'll be hard pressed to find a better community, better support or even a more innovative bunch. Besides RedHat's involvement, Fedora has been in the vanguard for desktop technologies like PipeWire, Flatpaks, Wayland, heck they were one of the first to push systemd.

But my problem is that since RedHat holds sway over the Fedora leadership we cannot guarantee that the community will have the users best interests at heart.

So when people say "use a community distro", they mean a non-captured one.

And again; Fedora is awesome, the community is awesome, been using it for years, but switched to NixOS like a month ago because I don't trust the direction RedHat/IBM is taking Fedora.

Most likely they'll push some of these projects to Fedora, make them maintain the projects, then some years down the line sell those projects as apart of their service.

There is a conflict of interest here and a clear opportunistic angle. RedHat wants to use the Fedora community as a free of charge testing grounds, in effect creating a userbase of free QA testers for future software.

This is predatory, it is an insult to the community, but the community is captured, and therefore will play ball with RedHat. This is the problem. If the community would give some assurances and protections, that would be nice, but so far it seems the Fedora community is more than willing to play ball with IBM/RedHat.

[–] jumper775@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

While yes red hat may try something like that, they also maintain lots of packages and develop technologies that fedora uses, so fedora is still benefiting from said arrangement. It is a trade off here, but I would argue it’s more than worth it as it’s better to be free qa and get decent software than not be anybody’s qa but either not have or have poor quality software.

[–] jasondj@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 year ago

WWLTD?

I always thought Fedora was his preferred distro.

[–] Auli@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it why do Redhat lawyers have any say on Fedora then?

[–] jumper775@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Red hat owns the trademarks as fedora isn’t a real legal entity. Red hat employees also hold most spots in the council, and financially support the project. The council spots are voted upon so they don’t have to be red hatters that’s just who we chose.