Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
Thereās oculus software for my vr but donāt know what Iām going to do with that
Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly
Update two: thatās a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info
Why do you find it concerning from the perspective of using the distro? the software is still open source, and itās not like theyāre benefitting from user-count. Redhat makes its money selling support, if you donāt like their business model, simply donāt pay them for support, and you get all the benefits and none of the ethical qualms.
I donāt think these ethical fears are grounds enough when completely unsubstantiated to be recommending a distribution thatās fundamentally worse for beginners.
āWhy do you find it concerningā¦?ā Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we donāt give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with āfreeā Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windowsā¦ a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competitionā¦ this applies to both open or closed software. Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer. IBM does the sameā¦ and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoplesā¦ this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Open software is great and a reassurance that no altering can go unnoticed but letās be realistic, when is the last time some entity, let alone non-American) audited a entire package of Fedora, let alone every single version of it, or smaller software. Debian is a US based but highly global collaborative distro so malice is far harder to introduce and gone unnoticed. Mint is based on Ireland so hardly with an militaristic goal, either by maintainers, financiers or country. My current OpenSUSE is far more susceptible to tampering than Mint, but it still cannot reach the knees of Fedora on susceptibility. We should look at Android and Chromeā¦ It is free, opensource, but the fact that Google de-facto controls it, uses it to dominate the landscape, first by suffocating competition and then, to steer where it wants the technology to go to. Therefore that it is opensource is great, we can check the code once in a while,
I am one of the very few that recognize Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu deviates yet I think we should steer clear from it. To newcomers, I tell them the reality; in my opinion Fedora is the marginally the best linux distro, now, if ethics (and a little bit privacy) is one of the motives to move away from Windows, you should consider distros not so heavily relying on the US and Mint usually comes first in my mind for them. We donāt want to get to the point that Fedora is so vastly superior to all the rest of Linux distros, that will be the only game in townā¦ like we did by solely go after Android (I really miss what my Nokia N9ās Meego could have become!)
well said, but i wonder how much it will matter in the future considering that the kernel group itself has so willingly kowtowed to american hegemony in its recent expulsion of russian developers from the kernel maintainers group to align itself with american export controls.
So true eldavi! The āRussian kernel maintainersā event was a big red flag for me. I know Linux had no choice to expel them due to the law, but the fact that Linus Torvalds did not thank them for the job done (if he kept them till then , Torvalds clearly has see their contributions as beneficial), and Torvalds did not try to reassure the audience that hardly any code is posted unsupervised in a open sourceā¦ that was the main scandal for me, far more than the ban. I had known that Torvalds was a rude person, many maintainers are and I am ok with that, but that event showed me that not only easily folds to government requests, but that also he believes it is ok to do these things against people you donāt likeā¦
In his own words; āplease use whatever mush you call brains. Iām Finnishā. I donāt think he referred to the Finland that thrived the most in its history during the period of maintaining a strong military culture yet NEUTRAL (1948-2023) and away from NATO, but he deeply meant the Finland that sided with Germany in the early 40s in order to stick-it to Moscow. Would he stop at firing developers or would be willing to do more for the cause? I bet many wonder.
This would make sense if redhat had partnerships with hardware vendors and was locking down systems. Theyāve never done that and thereās no evidence of a plan to. Furthermore, suffocating the competition when the competition is closed source platforms like what google is doing and microsoft is a good thing. Competition isnāt inherently good, competition is good when it does good things. In the case of completely FOSS from the ground up software, thereās no benefit to competition, it just means duplication of massive amounts of effort. If fedora started doing something shitty, there is no doubt that it would INSTANTLY be forked by hundreds of users to remove that, thereās no way for redhat to create a vendor-lockin situation the same canāt be said for windows or chromeos (yes you can technically fork chromeos but they have the software vendor locked on the hardware).
Redhat simply doesnāt have that level of control and canāt ever, unless they completely change their business model, which would also instantly make them worthless.
In other words, thereās no such thing as a redhat user, fedora is just a linux distro without any way of locking the user in to their particular distro. Iād be more worried about ubuntu trying this with snap. I challenge you going down this line of thinking to actually create a scenario where this is a problem that makes strategic sense on their part.
It could, but it doesnāt when the software isnāt vendor locked and is fully open source.
Again, as a user, how does this matter? Do you not think the military should run FOSS software? If youāre anti-military itās not like proprietary software wonāt work there. Iād rather have the military running foss software than proprietary software personally. Somebody was going to do it anyway, what does it matter?
Yes, the US is evil, but I donāt see what that has to do with their military running libre software.
I feel that I am being misinterpreted here. Of course FOSS if infinitely preferable to most close source, even if FOSS was created by the devil itself! And I am neutral US army branches using FOSS or not, that is not a problem for us civilians per se; the US army just using FOSS when they have unlimited budget and have home-brewed closed sources available and still choose Linux just proves that FOSS is superior! Now, that Red Hat depends heavily on US government contracts (mostly US armed forces) should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics (again, I say ethics and a little bit privacy concerns), not technological, at least no in the short term. However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily). Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for themā¦ now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of developmentā¦ Zero. That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources. It is just a principle, of course, I tell my audience that they can use Fedora and I understand it, it is technologically a bit better than Mint, yet not quite not as an ethical choice, nor good for the technology ecosystem in the long run either. Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master. This reminds me of Mozillaā¦ all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try itā¦ and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The USā foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
I agree that itās a red flagā¦ but in this case, I donāt think that red flag really amounts to something, just because something is a bad sign doesnāt mean it actually matters on proper analysis.
It will always be incredibly easy to fork because they have to follow the GPL.
Forking android is extremely easy, the part of android that theyāre unable to fork is the google play storeā¦ which is proprietary. Redhat has no equivalent and if they ever made one, theyād instantly be abandoned because the whole point of their business model is being FOSS.
Literally anyone in their basement can do it, tbh, i donāt know why you think this is difficult, android is a terrible example for this since it is mostly proprietary, sure the OS itself isnāt, but google play services are the hard part, again.
No, thatās why we should favor the GPL to the MIT license, and FOSS to proprietary software.
Except in this case their advantage is their free open source nature, which is literally the only reason the government has contracts with them.
weāre purely better off for it. librewolf exists, servo is picking up funding if you donāt like librewolf for some reason. The only reason firefox exists as a competitor is because of this antitrust situation, if we didnāt use firefox because we were concerned about this, weād have literally nothing. Itās also a counter-example to this idea you have that forking is difficultā¦ librewolf happened and it was easy.
Iām openly anti-military and anti-US, but I donāt think youāve thought these arguments fully through.
I am still no able to get my message through.
Of course, it is easy to fork, is that when you depend solely on a entity that it is prone to abandon you, you wont have the resources to continue the development. US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left. This is not far fetched, this is what happens with Android and Firefox. If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (Iām in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
I am afraid we are taking different things hereā¦ I look in a long perspective view, you in a inmediate future, where, as you said, no big changes if a dominant FOSS project goes hostile. The lack of expertise, culture makes it really hard in fact. Look at thisā¦ SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternativeā¦ it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hardā¦ relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iranā¦ well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
this isnāt even possible even if fedora got 99.9999% market share, most linux distros are passion projects, even the ones that arenāt donāt need much funding. Debian will never go away, arch will never go away, so that simply canāt happen unless theyāre militaristically destroyed. You say this is not far fetched, but iām afraid I completely disagree, that doesnāt even sound remotely possible. Fedora doesnāt even do that much, they just package together a bunch of other things that are developed completely independently of them (they donāt even make their own kernel, thatās like 90% of the work!)
fedora cannot legally become closed source, most of it is GPL licensed. Lookup ācopyleftā, this is why android isnāt already proprietary.
This isnāt true, there are many open source android projects could easily keep things going. The only reason huawei does all that is because of the proprietary parts, this doesnāt exist as a problem in linux, and cannot be created as one. Firefox would still be developed without mozilla, just significantly slower. Lookup phones with microg, they have no such issues keeping things going. Browsers are a special case that require a ton of resources to keep secure, OSās, not so much.
Also, google cannot legally close source android, thatās the point of the GPL.
Even then what youāre saying is āthese arenāt viable open source projects without a lot of fundingā and android absolutely is, firefox MIGHT be.
none of these concerns resemble this situation.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Androidā¦ how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investmentā¦ just forking sureā¦
Just as a remarkā¦ ācannot legally become closed sourceā. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trumpā¦ any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the wantā¦ Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you wonāt see much progressā¦ and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents āBroad Immunity for Official Actsā and āAbsolute Immunity for Core Powersā so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
Like iāve said repeatedly, itās the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, itās not a big deal.
hereās an example: https://xdaforums.com/c/bliss-roms.7296/
If they cannot do the work that single devs can do, then they arenāt even trying.
Single inexperienced developers do this with regularity for fun.
Thereās no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedoraās whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all theyād have is DNFā¦ Also, if this happened, redhat having marketshare would be the least of our worries. It really wouldnāt even matter.
hereās a full list of their projects: https://next.redhat.com/projects-full/
do you even use any of those?
Hell, they hardly even have DNF since theyāre trying to switch to flatpak, soon they wonāt even be in control of most of packaging, just the default suite of apps. This is an incredibly bad move if theyāre ever going to do what youāre claiming, itās essentially irreversible.
None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, itās the distribution of that software thatās valuable, they package it well, but they donāt make it themselvesā¦ KDE will not go with redhat, theyāre separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils arenāt made by them.
You seem to be under the impression that fedora is entirely made by redhat, this is completely false, itās just a bunch of things other people make theyāve bundled together. Redhat does not and cannot have much power over this unless they start building massive amounts of infrastructure from scratch, which they wonāt be able to justify to investors because it will, again, be entirely against their business model.
The moment fedora becomes proprietary, people will fork, switch, and never think about them again. Even if they do become proprietary through some magic, weāll still have all the previous versions to work with, theyāll have to offer some features to make switching to the proprietary version worthwhile, and given what KDE already offers, i canāt even imagine what that would be.
They honestly probably donāt even need to forkā¦ dnf isnāt even that good of a package manager.