this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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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.
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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
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?
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
Here is another one to switch to: Gentoo
How could I forget? Thanks. And Slackware, to date myself here.