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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • vacuumflower@vlemmy.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlSuse Liberty Linux
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    1 year ago

    Agree about SUSE, it’s really amazing.

    Yes, Debian and also Gentoo. Slackware may not be dead, but out of race in the sense of being a stabilizer as one of the “main” (culturally, not in numbers) distributions, and Arch has lost most of sanity it had (not much to begin with).




  • vacuumflower@vlemmy.nettoLinux@lemmy.mlSuse Liberty Linux
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    1 year ago

    I mean, RH became dominant by not initially being a bag of dicks.

    So if SUSE becomes the main enterprise vendor (to more precisely address RH’s role, one can say “root enterprise vendor”), then its enshittification is just a matter of time.

    Other than that, I like Tumbleweed, it just works, and, unlike Fedora, without bullshit.

    Still the whole corporate atmosphere makes me wary. SUSE is good, we just shouldn’t put all our eggs into one basket (and should fix that with RH).





  • I want to be clear on my bias here: I firmly believe that open source would not be a ‘thing’ if it weren’t for Red Hat. Linus Torvalds himself once said (albeit 10 years ago) that the shares he received from Red Hat before their IPO was ‘his only big Linux payout’. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that Red Hat has had a major significant positive impact on Open Source across the world.

    So we have to blame these guys for FreeBSD not becoming the main free Unix-like operating system?

    On a serious note, I firmly believe that I would not be a thing if it weren’t for my parents, which doesn’t mean they are right all the time.

    About work to debrand - they could just get back to the ancient Red Hat Linux model. Support is commercial, some software is commercial, everything else isn’t. I’m pretty sure that would be a better strategy.

    On one side, you have Red Hat, a long time champion of open source software, that has poured billions of dollars into open source development, and which has 1000s of employees who not only on ‘company’ time but in their own time manage, develop, contribute, and create open source code. They have funded countless successful and unsuccessful projects that we all use.

    Let’s not get on the path which will lead us to defending Microsoft.

    Against Red Hat are two largely distinct groups. The first is the Rebuilders themselves, who Red Hat has claimed ‘don’t offer anything of value back to the community’. This is not meant to be a statement on the usefulness of the rebuilds (Rocky, Alma, Oracle, etc.) but rather a very directed statement on whether or not the rebuilders are providing bug report, feedback, and contributions to the packages that Red Hat has included in RHEL.

    I think RH itself needs a free option of their enterprise system. Those businesses which use EL (say, like a few of machines with RHEL, and most with CentOS or replacements) likely won’t buy more RHEL.

    The Rebuild users are in a very unfortunate position: they’re about to lose access to a free product that they’ve come to depend on. They are, as expected, unhappy about Red Hat’s decision to stop providing access to RHEL sources. My next statement is callous, and I expect it to be read as such: You get what you paid for. That is not meant to indicate anyone is cheap, it’s just that you shouldn’t have expectations when you are using something for free.

    It could work as my previous example - some RHEL for things which need RH support. Some CentOS/etc for things which don’t.

    Unification is good, so for some new deployment not only the latter group would be, say, Debian, but also the former. Which is a loss for RH in fact.



  • From what I can tell, the rebuilders are not adding any kind of value to the situation.

    They are adding popularity. Enterprise is slow to change in some ways, but I can totally see the trend of moving to Debian. RH seems to have forgotten their own history and how they’ve started with one Red Hat Linux, with paid support for those who wanted it, and that’s what gave them the popularity to be profitable.

    They don’t seem to want to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, just to stop actively spending money making it easier when that work doesn’t return any money for the effort. Which is… Totally fair.

    They are, in fact, going to reduce their revenue. Which is the main criterion for a business, no?

    I mean, just like humans wither and die with time, so do companies.


  • Nobody and nothing living forever is one of the reasons centralization is bad. But humans sadly like to flock.

    RH is approaching the end of its life cycle. First they were hackers. Then they became a useful and aspiring business. Then RPM-based distributions were what made Linux not marginal anymore (though probably this also has something to do with Mandrake’s success). Then they became something in the center of things, connected to everything happening with Linux and other Unix-like systems (at least on desktop). Then they realized that and started milking that slowly. Then they became arrogant.



  • You mean that RH hates ergonomics? Agreed here.

    About the function of systemd (or docker, or pulseaudio, or gnome 3, or wayland) - well, I don’t need it, but I understand the usual arguments of its proponents. It does solve problems other init systems don’t. Only it’s such a PITA to use that I’m a Void Linux user.

    Especially sad considering that this was entirely different in the Gnome 2 times.



  • RH is the maintainer\developer of great many things. Of course it’d be nice for them to have good competition (like what Canonical was), so that they wouldn’t use that power for evil.

    Still them becoming weaker is not a case for optimism.

    I’d really like something like Gentoo with official binary packages (and relevant tree), so that building from source would be an option and installing a binary package the usual way. Well, also simpler installation maybe.

    I mean, Calculate Linux does that, but I think it’s a Russian small-business oriented distribution, so not exactly my use case.