Red Hat’s recent decision to restrict the source code for its enterprise Linux build has led open-source projects big and small to come up with creative strategies to continue to serve their users.
I used to think that Fedora being ultimately backed by IBM would give them stability. Then Redhat dismissed Tom Cotton, who was a key OSS liaison, and now it seems to be embarrassing itself with this bitterly hostile attitude towards everyone in the RHEL orbit. It’s been so out-of-character that most people initially assumed this was IBM leaning on RHEL. But it apparently was not. Then my Fedora installation choked on what seemed like a pretty ordinary kernel update and stopped booting.
It felt like a signal. I settled on EndeavourOS, and it’s been an all-around improvement. Nvidia drivers are optionally baked in, the AUR (which EOS also bakes in) is ten times what Copr could ever hope to be, and pacman is ridiculously speedy (though I suppose anything is faster than DNF). I know EOS will sometimes break, as is tradition for rolling releases, but I’m confident that Arch will at least keep being Arch for many years to come.
That’s the thing with 100% community backed distros. There’s never any drama, there’s never any controversial decisions, the most you’ll hear of is some leader figure being replaced or not treating others well. Honestly it’s what Linux should be in the first place.
I think it’s dishonest to paint that incident as “plenty of drama”. It was a decision most of the community agreed to and those who didn’t made a fork. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong in that. Compare it to Canonical forcing it’s official flavors to break flatpaks and appimages. I think the severity is very different.
I used to think that Fedora being ultimately backed by IBM would give them stability. Then Redhat dismissed Tom Cotton, who was a key OSS liaison, and now it seems to be embarrassing itself with this bitterly hostile attitude towards everyone in the RHEL orbit. It’s been so out-of-character that most people initially assumed this was IBM leaning on RHEL. But it apparently was not. Then my Fedora installation choked on what seemed like a pretty ordinary kernel update and stopped booting.
It felt like a signal. I settled on EndeavourOS, and it’s been an all-around improvement. Nvidia drivers are optionally baked in, the AUR (which EOS also bakes in) is ten times what Copr could ever hope to be, and pacman is ridiculously speedy (though I suppose anything is faster than DNF). I know EOS will sometimes break, as is tradition for rolling releases, but I’m confident that Arch will at least keep being Arch for many years to come.
That’s the thing with 100% community backed distros. There’s never any drama, there’s never any controversial decisions, the most you’ll hear of is some leader figure being replaced or not treating others well. Honestly it’s what Linux should be in the first place.
Oh there is plenty of drama, look at systemd.
I think it’s dishonest to paint that incident as “plenty of drama”. It was a decision most of the community agreed to and those who didn’t made a fork. I don’t think anyone did anything wrong in that. Compare it to Canonical forcing it’s official flavors to break flatpaks and appimages. I think the severity is very different.