We want our software to be communist, but it is a capitalist world (at present). Navigating in the grey area between the two will always lead to controversy. We're like China, trying to walk a tightrope between the ideal and the practical.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Normally I sit back from this sort of drama: there are certainly bad actors and bad attitudes in various places, but in the end, for most purposes, it's just another distribution?
But one commenter here, by looking so strongly like an idiotic shill, has now turned me against RH and Fedora. Hopefully the sour taste will fade soon and I'll forget, but for now: Use Debian-based or Arch-based, people! Or SUSE! (I know they had their controversial moment, but AFAIK all is forgiven.) Or another! But keep control and consolidation out of Red's hat.
Absolutely, we should talk about this more. Red Hat and IBM can swing their dick around and make literally any change they want to Linux. They control a lot of things, like FreeDesktopOrg (how free is that free?)
I am wary of their bullshit. We need to make sure to keep alternatives to big corporate software in case they decide to fuck us over.
Use GPL software, above all else, and remember, if GPL wasn't effective in cutting the corpo hand they wouldn't spread propaganda against it.
Red Hat probably contributes to Open Source and Linux more than any other company around. Are they perfect? Of course not, and it's fair and good to discuss and criticise them when warranted. But overall they seem to contribute positively much more than negatively.
How are they "doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem." exactly ?
Amount of contributions doesn't equal quality, mind that. RedHat also does work to sink projects which don't fit their strategy for Linux development, and I want to ask by what right they even have such a strategy and try to impose it upon others.
Remember that in 2023 RedHat restricted access to the source code of RHEL packages, which had a big impact to lots of server distros. This article explains really well why that's problematic:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
unrelated, but I love your profile's display pic haha
Not really
It isn't a black and white thing. Redhat simply exists like anything else. I don't like everything they do but they also fund a ton of research and development. If Fedora ever becomes problematic people will just move. Ubuntu desktop used to be good but after it turned to shit many people moved.
IBM sucks. They have bought up a bunch of small data centers and made them worse.
I'm still pissed about CentOS as well. Long live Rocky.
Alma is actually a real community distro. They deserve so much more support than Rocky does.
TIL; though I moved my servers to Debian ... having the ability to sanely upgrade without a reinstall is a major plus.
@Dark_Arc @LeFantome I've had mixed luck with debian in this regard. Bullseye to Bookworm was a smooth upgrade but some of the others have not gone so well.
I'm pretty sure Alma had a way to upgrade major releases. I know RHEL has Leapp, but it is always recommended to do a greenfield reinstall. Although with image mode and ostree that is changing.
Interesting ... yeah it looks like Leapp can do some upgrades for Alma and possibly others as well (TIL). I'm not sure how well that upgrade process would compare / be supported vs Debian though.
What's the image mode and ostree stuff? Is that required for RHEL and/or Alma going forward?
No image mode is not required. It is the immutable mode for RHEL. Using image builder and bootc to create and upgrade your images. Ostree is sort of like putting your entire OS in git. For an upgrade it checks out a new branch, updates that branch, then you have to reboot into that branch. That makes the upgrade atomic and gives you the ability to rollback. It's what Core OS uses and what the Fedora Atomic desktops use. It's a much bigger thing in RHEL 10 and I suspect will take over a lot of the duties of Satellite at some point.
Ahhh so leapp will simply become less relevant because a better upgrade mechanism will take over
That's my thoughts anyway. The entire linux world seems to be heading the immutable direction.
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Yeah but its pretty easy to avoid them. They survive on government contracts not community support. There's lots of better alternatives than Fedora.
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