turdas

Date: January 19, 2022

Gimp is just... not great. It's ten years behind the times. These days I tend to use Krita, even though it's more geared towards digital painting than general image editing.

I don't have any expectations of them doing this (but I also have no expectations to the contrary), but I think it would be a good move from Red Hat to make the official RHEL more available, as you suggest.

In another thread I compared the RHEL rebuilds to piracy, and in that vein one could quote Gabe Newell and say that piracy is a service problem -- part of the reason Alma/Rocky/etc. exist is because there is a group of users who want to use RHEL but cannot afford it. Red Hat seems to believe that these users should be satisfied with CentOS Stream, and maybe most of them would be, if they only gave it a try. But making RHEL more widely accessible, both to paying users and developers, would probably be good too.

You can’t build your own distro on the backs of upstream’s work, and then refuse to do the same with downstream. Even if you don’t see any value in it, someone does, it’s not up to you to decide that, or you have missed the point of open source entirely

That’s what companies like Microsoft do, or what Apple does: they prevent competitors from even existing, or from being as good.

This is not a matter of "seeing" value in what Alma and Rocky do, because their value is plainly apparent to anyone, undoubtedly including Red Hat: they're basically 1:1 RHEL clones, except you don't have to pay Red Hat to use them. It should also be plainly apparent to anyone why Red Hat would consider this a problem for their business; their main product is the effort that goes into producing and maintaining RHEL, so it is only logical that they would want to maintain as much exclusivity as possible on that product.

Alma and Rocky are competitors to RHEL in much the same way piracy scene groups are competitors to game publishers. It is obviously not a fair competition.

And the real problem isn’t really how Alma or Rocky will survive, they’ll have more work to do, but they’ll manage with the CentOS Stream code. The real issue is that acting like that will in the end, harm Red Hat’s business.

[snip]

And Red Hat flat out lying about how they’ll handle things in the future makes them utterly untrustworthy for businesses: are you going to base your business decision on what a company said today, when they already screwed you over twice? No.

No it doesn't. Red Hat hasn't screwed over their customers, they've screwed over a bunch of people who aren't their customers. Why would any paying RHEL customer feel screwed over by this?

There is literally zero practical reason to switch, so no one can answer that question without getting into your head and weighing the inconvenience of switching a distro against the ideological fervor and satisfaction you gain from showing those evil capitalists at Red Hat that you won't tolerate their actions by... switching off an almost entirely unrelated distro.

Personally I won't be switching away from Fedora for the foreseeable future, and think that you and half the people in this thread are being more than a little silly.

edit: Also, "now that"? This move is completely in line with Red Hat's behaviour for the past like 20 years. It will also quite literally affect nothing else but the existence of RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky, because virtually all the code and work that goes into RHEL is still upstreamed, and RHEL sources will still continue, in practice, to be publicly available, just with some delay.

These days this is rarely that useful. The most common reason games don't work on Linux is anticheat, and games with that kind of anticheat tend to try to stop you from running them in a VM too. There are ways around that, but it's an annoying cat-and-mouse game.

Most RPMs for third party applications are already packaged specifically for Fedora rather than RHEL.

Substantiating your claims isn't "spoonfeeding", it's just common courtesy to give reassure others that you aren't talking completely out of your arse.