Pinning a comment in response to the pro-corporate lobby. Other EL systems are not just copy/paste. There's a lot of work that goes into it, work that Red Hat encouraged until money got in the way. They don't do what Canonical does for Ubuntu/Debian systems, but it's a lot more than someone's "hobby clone". Some seem to think that these "clones" are a wholesale ripoff. Tell that to the thousands of devs out there building RHEL software (something which helps Red Hat's "open source" bottom line) and using Rocky or Alma as a dev target. I also don't accept the argument that big companies like Oracle (or even Red Hat) *shouldn't* try to make a buck off of another organization's open source software... in my mind that's similar to what Canonical does with Debian, who are well within their rights to do so. Again, I'm not naive about corporate influence in Linux. Go ahead and write commercial software from open sources, but expect some flack if you don't share your source code freely- particularly after advertising for a generation or two that you'd keep it free as a core principle of your corporate culture. In short- Debian structured their project in a way that allows a company like Canonical to exist without fighting them in the courts. They figured something out that Red Hat's missed. And that, to me, is a reason to choose Debian.
Also, folks using words like "idiot", "stupid", or the like in response to human beings will get the boot. That's not discourse I care to have. Go ahead and unsubscribe if you don't like it, I don't want your views.
Oh trust me the EL systems do a lot! I can appreciate the amount of work and effort that goes into them. Rocky has contributed numerous tools which are beneficial to the whole ecosystem. One prominent tool being Peridot. Rocky also has great documentation for new users. I'm actually working with the Rocky team on verifying if Stream is capable of creating a good clone or not. Skip Grube and Jon Wright (from Alma) are doing research on the current package drift between the RHEL package set and CentOS Stream git history. When it comes to Debian I personally don't like the APT package manager. I've had instability issues in the past with it, but other than that I love Debian! Debian has a solid base and if it weren't for apt I think it could be a "sit it and forget it" type of setup.
While I don't really know what to think of Red Hat's stance yet and I personally use AlmaLinux as well, I don't agree that clones are not a "wholesale ripoff" (although I wouldn't use that loaded term either). The reason why the clones are popular is exactly what we've been saying for all of these years. It's free RHEL. That's why we like 'em. The problem with going wholesale into the Debian ecosystem, is frankly that its desktop component is not very good. With the Red Hat ecosystem on the other hand, we have Fedora Linux, which smokes Debian by a mile on the desktop. If you choose to go with the Debian server component, that's fine, but you'll be using a "corporate" Linux on the desktop (Ubuntu or System76) if you want to keep the same analog or be forced to use something that is just plain lackluster (plain Debian). I do feel like Fedora Linux is a bit of an in-between for "corporate" Linux and community Linux. So basically, you either have to be switching back and forth between Linux distro paradigms, you are using a "corporate" distro, or you are not having a good time. Sorry if I offended desktop Debian fans. This is just my opinion.
More like Debian and Nix. Optionally Guix. Pacman does have some issues which would need to be fixed, like 'forced' updates if you want to Install new updates, which probably won't get resolved anywhere soon. It may change in the future, but for now I would say it's 4th best of Community driven distros for typical users, and I doubt it will get better.
I appreciate your editing video craftsmanship, it shows that you really enjoy what you do and also the amount of work that you put into this. Thank You, Veronica.
CentOS was a community distro. That's what the C stands for. The issue there was it was open to being purchased and the bylaws or whatever allowed for it to be changed. Rocky and AlmaLinux now take up the Enterprise community distro. The question is whether they set the legal entity up to keep it community. AlmaLinux is a spin of CloudLinux and Rocky is from the same dude who created CentOS.
Community-driven is safer. But hey, what's wrong with the medieval liturgic way of maintaning software for distros like Debian? It really copies the worst things of bureaucracy.
Red Hat was my first distro, which I got from a CD included with some computer magazine, way back in the day. One of my evangelical open source buddies predicted Red Hat pulling a stunt like this someday. I think the only thing about this story that might have surprised him was just how long it took.
@@musicalneptunian I don't know, where you live, but even in my country (and I know many countries have worse politicians) I would switch most politicians for toenails. For example a guy named Markus Söder. He is way more disgusting than a jar of toenails.
I've recently found my go-to combo for literally 99. (9)% of things that I do: Debian Testing on desktop/laptop, Debian Stable on servers/workstations. I wasn't that happy about software choice for a long time. Use Gnome on desktops/laptops + flatpaks for things like telegram, remmina etc. Looks good, runs good. Considering there is a proposal to add telemetry to Fedora 40, I've completely lost faith in any corporate-run and corporate-backed distros. TBH, I would've expected that sort of move more from Canonical. RedHat (before IBM acquisition) was more or less The Good Guy of corporate world. Not just they made rhel code publicly available, they also contributed mostly upstream, letting everyone benefit from their improvements. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. RIP RedHat I guess.
As an admin myself, I've been through so many different distributions it makes my head spin trying to remember them all! I started off with Slackware, then across to RedHat (up until RedHat 9 when they stopped those releases). Then I moved over to OpenSUSE, United Linux (yeah, I am that old), then SLES. The list goes on. But I am interested to hear your views on AWS Linux. It seems to be gaining traction, and does not get hit by RedHat's decision.
The issue is the ability to be binary 1:1 or bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL. AlmaLinux has indicated it will no longer be binary compatible but will be be ABI compatible, which is probably good enough. RockyLinux has said it will still be able to be binary compatible. We'll see. But as an admin with over 400 Linux instances and the need for long term package support, an enterprise distro with clear roadmaps is required. So glad these two are taking it up.
Thank you for such a thought provoking video! I love the humour you bring to your work! As a corporate IP lawyer, I'm interested in observing how this all plays out and whether any other corporate Linux distributions go the same route. Potentially quite a watershed moment in IT.
I am very fortunate that the first distro I used extensively was Debian 5. I loved it and I've used Debian extensively ever since. I've also gotten into Arch since it's what runs on my Steam Deck. Community distros forever!
man, you could turn this story into a mad-lib with how identical it is to what happened recently with Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and the D&D Open Game License.
@@hyperfocus94 ...and now Unity, prompting Pillar of Garbage to post video ID xDPPig9JR5Y about techno-feudalism. (See also Cory Doctorow's enshittification cycle.)
I think you're right. Oracle, Microsoft and now Rehat all actively working against open source and the wider benefit. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is exactly what happened to Centos Linux which was originally a community distro, until Redhat took legal ownership and board control.
I'm more into Void Linux than Debian, but I think openSUSE is a good choice too, since it is enterprise backed, but community driven as well. That deserves a honorable mention. I also love the approach they took by focusing on privacy (setting up tight default firewalls), providing their Open Build System for all distros, and also the easy for beginner sysadmins YaST2 Control Panel.
TH-cam just suggested this video to me, as well as your video about PopOS skipping their 23.x releases. I thoroughly enjoyed both, and I have subscribed. It’s nice to see a voice of civility and whimsy in the FOSS community, when many other channels that discuss Linux seem to be the angry ranty type.
I love the way you ended the video. I too disagree with what RedHat/IBM has done, but I will not stop using Fedora, because it succeeds for me where others have failed on multiple occasions
Yeah I'm in the same boat, no other distro offers an experience that is easy to use + up to date packages without breaking than Fedora does. openSUSE would be a close second and I would use it more if Yast wasn't a thing (I find it too complicated to use and not a fan of having to install stuff from it instead of the Software store)
@@Robotta Hey, Tumbleweeed user here, what have you installed from YaST? In all this time, I've evaded YaST for software installation with 100% success, so it's not obligatory to use. In fact, I've been using Discover more to find new alternatives. I can understand you finding YaST kind of complicated, but once you give it a look, you can find anything you need in a fast way. I only use it to manage repositories some times and to edit GRUB because it's easier that way.
I recently switched two of my machines over to Debian 12 (running MATE) and I am really enjoying the experience. The setup process was yards ahead of what it used to be, the distro feels fast, even on my aging ThinkPad T460s, and it feels like I'm doing a good thing for the community. I remember when you could buy copies of RedHat (before the Fedora split and all that) at Kmart back in the '90s; it's a shame to see the direction RedHat has chosen.
I was at my cousin's, early 2000s, and she had just gotten a computer, but it was useless, as it didn't have an os installed. Went to the magazine shop downstairs, choose one of the live CDs, and boom, she had a working PC!
On one hand, I agree with RedHat They are the ones, because they are larger than other Linux providers, to resolve bugs faster than other providers. That staff costs!! On the other hand, the Alma and Rocky and Eurolinux/SUSE/Ubuntu/Oracle distros just take from RH, without giving back. I have seen only two distros resolving security bugs with original fixes. For most of the Linux users on TH-cam, and that includes me, I am a hobbyist. I benefit from my 20 years of free Linux and Linux support. So, how does RH cut costs and stop the pseudo "Piracy"? Do we need to have a very low cost subscription fee to access the bug fixes? Should we be paying some small amount ($5US) for each full distro we download, which will include a year's bugfixes? If so,.then RH can recover from the RH clones who take, but don't compensate RH for the work done
How people contextualize Fedora is kind of complicated. Fedora is technically community run, it is just sponsored by Redhat. I think people feel uncomfortable contributing code to/testing Fedora because it benefits Redhat. However, does this not apply to contributing to the linux kernel? Contributing to gnome? Contributing to flatpak?
Fedora is not "just sponsored" by Red Hat, RH completely owns and controls the project. They own all the trademarks, all the infrastructure, and the project is dictated by Red Hat's interests. The biggest decision-makers in Fedora are Red Hat employees.
Thanks Veronica for a really thorough video. I was on PopOS and fully switched to Debian 12 on everything this year, it seems like many people feel like this. What distinguishes projects like system 76 from redhat etc. is that System76 is Engineering driven company, while RedHat, IBM, Oracle et al. seem to have dropped the ball and now just extract shareholder value from what they already had.
SUSE seems to be committed to the Open Source community through all this. I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling release community distribution they sponsor. And SUSE just announced yesterday they were forking RHEL. I'm sure SUSE has a profit motive too, as they're a coporation. But I feel like they're one that I can kind of get behind. On my laptop, I'm dual-booting between OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and NixOS.
@@Nefsen I get the cynicism. I'm just now reading your comment. But yes, SUSE had been sold several times. And yes, I know it s an attempt to grab customers from Red Hat. As I said, I'm sure there's a profit motive in SUSE's actions. Still, SUSE is even older than Red Hat and I feel they have an even closer connection. SUSE is German. I'm not sure if that changes any of the corporate culture by any means, as I don't know German culture all that well. But I assume there would be some differences when dealing with an American corporation like Red Hat. But I have red that Germany has a culture where workers and bosses work together a bit more than most places in the US. So I wonder if this might help SUSE have a different attitude towards open source than American corporations. But I really don't know, TBH. Still, I liked OpenSUSE before all this. I'm a fan of YAST in particular, and I like Tumbleweed because while it's a rolling release, they do a bit more testing before releasing packages, and they don't break things like Manjaro. :)
What's going on in the Linux distro world is just an echo of what has already been going on in the programming language world: Meta is rewriting Facebook from PHP to Hack (its own corporate language), TH-cam from Python to Go, etc. Corpos feel the need to control more and and extinguish anything community-driven. My experience of this comes from the Java environment: like when I was searching what IDE is best for Java , all that was happening was IntelliJ IDEA (corporate) punching down on Eclipse (community driven)...
I hear what you're saying, but transitioning from Python to Go is more of a technical decision than a corporate orthodoxy, despite it being Google's own programming language. That's because Go is still considered a toy language just like Python, and yet runs considerably faster than Python. So it's an easy win just on technical merits. I'm not sure what you mean by Eclipse vs IntelliJ, sure one is a commercial tool while the other is not, and in my opinion both are fine text editors. But IntelliJ is a much better developer experience. One could certainly use Vim instead, and many people do.
I'm looking forward to your next video! Wink, wink, hint, hint. I just started digesting the SuSE/openSuSE news yesterday and I was pretty excited right up until the moment I fell asleep with my phone in my hand.
Thank you, Veronica. After recovering from Solaris, I became a RHEL fanboi but like you, was dismayed to see their recent direction. You're right about Debian - it just works (usually) - but perhaps we'll hear some horror stories in the comments.
@@2501bproject Actually I tried to spawn a VM using cockpit on it (debian 12) and it failed :( The same exact setup just works perfectly fine on RHEL, Fedora and even o Ubuntu. Don't get me wrong, I do like Debian (and used it since 3.0 days), but for me RHEL is working better on my home server.
Been using it since 2001/2002 in my own PCs, laptops and servers. Compared to Windows at the time, I only had to install it on new computers. It's great!
@@georgH I had it on my NSLU2 , but they dropped support for it at or around Stretch. It ran a couple of cameras and another couple of drives through a four way USB hub, all on 32MB of physical memory. It never complained.
I'm more of a FreeBSD man myself, but in years past I always thought pretty highly of RedHat as a company, but when IBM got involved I knew something bad was coming. Where they are now? What a shame. I'd really hoped back in the day they'd give MS a run for their money.
I love and use Debian 12 on multiple systems. I'm a retired school teacher. When I was working I built a computer lab in my classroom using throw away PCs, running Debian 4.0(Etch). The kids loved it. It's sad, but, very predictable about Red Hat. IBM wants to turn a profit on their investment.
Redhat seems to be going all-in on trying to control desktop Linux. Trying to lock out distros like Alma, ditching Xorg, KDE, and Motif. The end goal seems to be try to make desktop Linux strictly Redhat/Wayland/Gnome. There's other stuff they've deprecated seemingly because it competes with their commercial offerings. So yea, it's all about the Benjamins.
2:53 not to mention they didnt built it alone, they had tons of volunteers to help and those might not help if they knew the code would close in the future
Thank you, Veronica. Welcome to the hard core ;) I've settled on Linux Mint, Debian Edition Version 5 (aka LDME5) That's essentially Debian 11 (bullseye) + the Cinnamon desktop and apps. I love it because it feels as smooth and predictable as the classic Mac UI. Looking forward to LDME6 later this summer...
I just switched from Windows to Linux for the first time, and I'm loving it. I had wanted to try Linux since I was 15 back in 1999, and even bought a boxed distro at CompUSA back then called Storm Linux, I wasn't able to get it working and had to give up and never thought I'd get a chance to use Linux again. Circumstances finally aligned with me getting sick of Microsoft's crap, and I refuse to go to 11, so I downloaded Nobara. It's incredible and I feel just as excited as I did back when I was a kid and teen while using my computer now. Its a life long dream come true. Now, onto the topic of the video, the idea of Linux becoming commercial is terrifying, I really hope things don't fully go down that path. I hate that so many corporations seemingly control Linux. Sorry for the essay. I love your channel and look forward to more videos from you!
Hi, Veronica. I enjoyed our conversation this afternoon at Free Geek. (I'm the guy who wrote COBOL for the first 20 years of his professional life and donated the IMSAI (built by me in 1976) to Free Geek. It was good indeed to meet you and I'm happy to be seeing your community-based Linux-oriented channel surviving. Cheers! Doug Meyer
I'm glad I found your channel. I've watched a few of your videos and I love how you explain things in a clear, user-friendly way. I've been using computers for 40 years (my first was a Commodore VIC-20, yay!) but I'm relatively new to Linux. My introduction to it has been through the acquisition of vintage ThinkPad machines, essentially, and my favourite setup has been this ThinkPad X301 I acquired recently, that came with CrunchBang++. The experience so far has been enjoyable and hassle-free. I've subscribed to your channel - I'm sure that thanks to you I will learn more things down the road. Cheers! //Rick
great vid. the maniacal laugh is the best. Good for a future career in villainy. Anyway, I've been loving Debian but on my ancient laptop. Instead of going full SID repo on it, I installed (and ran and updated) debian stable (from 10 up to 12) and just took my gpu driver from SID, which sounds like it would be horribly tricky and frought with peril... but actually wasn't. That way, I get the best of both worlds. Nice, rock-solid stable for a laptop I don't need or want to update that often, and can still use its gpu driver (bad overheating with the open source one), and use flatpaks for all the applications I use regularly. It's a great combination.
Cheers for the upload. I'm big on Fedora, and what worries me is this: I know that they're sponsored by Red Hat and they also own the name if I'm not mistaken. What's the worst that could happen with Red Hat's ongoing "We live in a society" mindset? Also it never crossed my mind to pair Debian with Flatpack, it's such a fabulous sight to have the ye ol dusty repo that is built to not break, along with modern Flatpack stuff.
Not heard a bad word said about Debian 12 so far. Currently use MX Linux based on Debian but may give bookworm a try at some point. Entertaining video.
You did the right thing with Debian on the desktop. I have been a Debian user for about 2 decades. For servers, it's all stable all the time, and I *almost* never enable outside repos. For my personal desktop, I install and use Testing, as it helps me see the development of the new stable release as it is going. It is a nice balance between the stability and speed of package upgrades in stable and the bleeding edge chaos that can be in Sid on rare occasions. Either option is fine, depending in your level of comfort with Linux. In all that time, I only had one package that I felt compelled to compile from scratch (as this was before Flatpak, AppImage, or Snaps were a glimmer in the developers' eyes... Gaim/Pidgin. Back when AOL Instant Messenger was still a thing, Debian development wasn't keeping up with the pace of changes to the AIM protocol, so I would compile each new release shortly after Pidgin released it. It was a simple "./configure; make; sudo make install" after getting the dev packages installed the first time. But that was obviously more than a decade ago, seeing as how long AIM has been dead.
The rock solid foundation of Debian is amazing, and I simply spin up docker containers on server with self contained dependencies if I need something up to date. For personal desktop, depending on the hardware, I'd choose either PopOS with Nvidia driver or simply Ubuntu/Debian with gnome depending on which one downloads faster
I'm very happy I've stuck with Debian. I add on what I want and get what I want. It's perfect for my style. If you don't use it, give GNU Screen a shot, to my last knowledge it was better than tmux because you can record sessions from their creation. Tmux used to have the limitation that you only got a log when a successful connection was created. What's nice about the log from spawn of the session is that you can see all failures which helps for troubleshooting in general. Very cool channel, and I agree with your take on Debian. I just use it at home.
Yup! And I do use BSDs for servers a bit, actually. Particularly with x86 COBOL where there's some idiosyncrasies around Linux sometimes. Sometimes something old doesn't play nice with systemd and I find that a BSD is just the right thing.
I work in the mid-tier space where we have a growing install base of RHEL servers. I've long found their repo packaging a bit annoying, and recent drama aside, they largely work very well and will for some time. For my personal projects, I've used Debian now for nearly 20 years and wouldn't choose anything else. Stable on servers, testing on desktop. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your recent experiences with Debian.
@@spykezspykez7001 Unix has several very fundamental ideas And one of them is "one component does ONE thing and does it well" systemd is the mocking of that principle It's like you think of USA without the hypocrisy: that's NOT REALLY USA
@@alastorgdl You do know it's 2024 right? Good God. Init and scripts are not event based and from a different era in time when a Machine was physical and stationary and had maybe 40 packages at the most. Not tens of thousands. Only SystemD or Solaris's XML based event driven init systems can handle containers, images moving from on prem to cloud, cyber security attacks, and even basic configuration changes such as a laptop going to sleep on a corporate network and waking up in a hotel. You can't do these things with init without evil hacks and whole programs (which should be config files only) in RC files. Change is hard and it is best as an IT professional to get with the program and remain current and relevant. Things like Teraform and SystemD with declaritive and event driven services and processes are how to handle a modern 21st century environment.
Hey I'm new to your channel and new to the Linux community in general, even though I've been a Linux user personally for years now. I just gotta say, I love your content, I love your vibe, I love your passion, I love your outro theme, and most specifically I love your take on this topic! Great video, thanks!
Huawei contribution to Linux particularly Android is huge. Unfortunately, Google banned Huawei from using Android in their phone. Business kills community projects, Politic kills Business.
Debian is so good. I first tried it back in the late '90s. At the time I was familiar with Solaris, HP/UX, RedHat, and Slackware. Debian felt noticeably more reliable, and more professionally put together, than any of those other distributions. I was really surprised at just how solid it was, and how reliably you could install it, then just keep upgrading it as new versions were released. I didn't see a hiccup from it for years. And the consistency with which all of its packages were well documented, followed consistent guidelines, and made the thing a pleasure to work with was very impressive (the only time I've felt a similar level of OS-wide consistency and quality was when I briefly ran FreeBSD, which is also superb). I still think Debian is a great platform today. I run Pop! on my desktop and laptop, mainly to save me the extra step of configuring a desktop of equivalent quality myself.
As someone who's been studying IT while in college since 2019, this boils my blood a tad because on one hand it makes linux systems as a whole look bad to people who don't know the whole context. I'm fine continuing to use Ubuntu and Debian for both desktop and server use. But now I'll be facing barriers for jobs that want people who use and have experiene with RHEL
I think a lot of what Red Hat has done can also be contributed to companies (probably government agencies too, just a hunch) that don't like Open Source, but still want to use Linux Servers. I've worked for companies that, for whatever reason, are insistent on "Closed Source Software" which boggles my mind. I had to tell one company "just because it's Closed Source doesn't make it more secure!" not that that company ever listened to their Devs. Well, they got RHEL as a Closed Source Option now.
I'm never going to be the guy that says Oracle is the good guy in any given situation, but IBM/Red Hat couldn't have done a more perfect job of teeing things up for Oracle to drive one straight down the fairway to LOOK like the good guy without even having to try hard. INCREDIBLY short-sighted of IBM...like, not looking forward past the next quarterly financials. Thanks for the video, I'm agreeing with you regarding Debian...12 has been an awesome release so far, and I'm waiting for the corresponding Raspberry Pi OS to come out in full release based on bookworm.
I have 3 Linux boxes at home and all of them run Linux Mint. I've tried a lot of distros starting with Redhat 5.1. Mint is the best in my books. Easy to install, never breaks and is super stable. I'm no programmer but I just want a machine that works and doesn't bother me with nonsense.
As I get older, I actually have more of an appreciation for For Profit companies. At the same time, I have less appreciation for Publicly Traded companies which seem to be the ones making all the bad decisions, probably because it's not the owners of those companies who get to make all of the decisions, but the shareholders.
Yeah I don't have a problem with a company making a profit and there are some non-profit companies that can be more of a scam and hide behind the non-profit flag or a way to get tax free status. But I just like the company to be well-behaved and not underhanded. The publicly traded ones have to be watched like a hawk.
I like your plasma layout. It really is well optimized for good screen real estate in my opinion. I like thin status/menu bar on top and dock on the left. It gives more vertical space.
Similar to Debian, you could also look at one of the other "founding fathers" of Linux: Slackware... and the easier-to-use derivative, Salix OS! I've done research recently and am really impressed with Salix for many reasons, and will definitely be installing it on one of my laptops soon. Edit: Does anyone have experience using Nitrux OS? I see it is Debian-based, but uses OpenRC instead of systemd(another controversial corporate product coming from Red Hat...) and with an immutable root...
What are the differences between regular Slackware and Salix? What I observed is a increasingly lower stability. 15 years ago, Slackware was rock solid and ultra responsive. Versions 14.x were extremely shaky for me. 15.0 is better but Firefox can crash X and sometimes entire system, which was unthinkable in 10-12 times. Have you observed the same?
@@alastorgdl I used Slackware a long time ago, and it was my primary Linux system due to its simplicity and stability, but then I ended up using various Red Hat based/derived Linux systems for some time, and over the last few years I used only Windows. Now I'm in the process of ditching Windows and moving back to Linux... so I've been testing a few options and doing research about the current state of Linux distros, with various pros and cons that accompany them. From that research I discovered Salix OS, and has been impressed with what I've read about it. It is apparently 100% backward compatible with Slackware, and the additional repositories that Salix provides can also be used with vanilla Slackware. Salix does however have some additional tools to make things easier for people who do not have the time or patience to do everything "by hand". E.g. Salix includes some GUI tools such as the Gslapt frontend for package management from various sources, including multiple repositories and Slackbuilds. It also claims to have "sysvinit-scripts Tweaked for boot speedup", "optimized for desktop usage", "high quality package repositories with dependency support", "incredibly fast package tools", ... You've got me worried now, when you say that Slackware is no longer as stable as it used to be... that is precisely why I was looking at going back to it... So should I rather use Debian? I would really prefer to not have the bloat and big-tech "sponsored" systemd and similar "we know what is best for you" systems :) Unfortunately that rules out vanilla Debian, as it is only available with systemd. That (and because of the added immutability feature) has gotten me quite interested in Nitrux (Debian-based, but uses OpenRC init). I've used two non-systemd Linux systems (Artix and Void) and I definitely prefer them over Fedora, for example. Artix does however have much fewer software packages available than Arch and many other distros, unless you add the Arch repos to it and risk dependency / compatibility problems. Void is nice and their documentation is excellent, but I would prefer to use a system with more established roots, such as a Debian / Slackware based one, as binaries are more often available for such systems than for the "new kids on the block".
Arch user here. I started in 1996 with Slackware 3.0 (2-CD set) and I noticed along the years how dynamic things are comparing Linux to other operating systems (especially Windows). What I really enjoy on Linux is its flexibility: you may have a server, a workstation, a NAS or even some hardware based on ARM, all running based on the same (free and open) sources. Speaking about Red Hat move, it might be related to Microsoft and their "partnership" regarding Azure. I know it's a wild guess and I have no good reason to "believe" my hunch is right. Thanks for the video!
5:35 the real problem is 10 year LTS - debian does not have it - i've been told of a Debian ELTS payed project and asked a quote but probably it will end up in crazy prices
Another great video vkc! It seems like Debian is the future, Ubuntu is starting to get a bit weird too, I wish there were more distros based on Slackware aswell. My home is Crunchbangplusplus with Debian stable/preconfigured Openbox. CBPP stopped my chronic distro-hopping journey.
I would be interested to see how you feel about SUSE, the company and also the Distro, specifically tumbleweed. They have pledged to stay open and so far I think they have been true to the people. I felt the same way about RHEL a few years ago though...
I felt disappointed about the situation and what made it worse was my first distro was the original Red Hat 7.3 (before Fedora and RHEL). But the Malevolent piece cracked me up lol.
Thank you for the great update, the passion for Community, the humor, and all the Toor(s) of distros. We appreciate you and best wishes on your basement.
The main things I like about Pop (on a ThinkPad laptop) are the frequency and ease of installing firmware updates and the tiling windows that can be dragged into place without having to memorize vim keybindings (and which at the flip of a switch can be floating). Is this native in Gnome or KDE yet for easy install on Debian?
Epic double commenting lol, as I'm really starting to appreciate the Linux ecosystem, I feel like I may even be able to contribute to Debian in some ways? I should definitely see how this all works! I think between that, and the massive push Valve Software is doing with the Steam Deck and it's contributions to the kernel and arch and wine and well pretty much a lot of things lol, we're maybe witnessing the beginning of a new golden age for Linux without even realizing it! If ONLY Wayland was more ready... I'm impatient I admit it!
So you switched your video editing system to Debian sid. I've been considering sid as well while using btrfs, grub-btrfs, and snapper to enable easy system snapshotting and rollbacks in the grub boot menu in the event of a bad update - in bsd speak, I think they call them "boot environments". Should be a good strategy for arch as well, or any rolling distro. Perhaps a video on this subject?
I have been using RHEL and (even more) AlmaLinux for a while. The OS itself is actually absurdly stable and very good to use in a server environment. This change has led me to question if I should even keep going with RHEL itself or AlmaLinux on my systems since we can’t fully predict where Red Hat is going with this.
So... Kinda funny. We have been using Debian as our default Linux OS for years now in our organization. We've been experimenting with Ansible for about a year now, and were considering moving to RHEL. In fact we acquired a small subscription to POC it. Might need to reconsider that plan...
We are required by clients and auditors require us to have vendor support. We used to use CentOS for development, testing, UAT and staging. For production environments used RHEL with paid support. We switched to Ubuntu when Red Hat killed down stream CentOS. Best choice we made.
thank you.. You are the YT'er that I am going to recommend to my retired aunt whom I am trying to get to use Linux. Btw, what do you think of Arch as a distribution for daily usage? Any good arch clone to recommend for a hassle free life? I was in love with CentOS, till it was altered irreparably by IBM/RedHat. For now it is Rocky Linux, but I see a situation where I have to move on from RHEL based systems - so openSuse (though they are controlled by a company too), Gentoo, Slackware, Debian and Arch. I am not sure which one of Arch and Debian to go for, as I have heard lot of good things (particularly the availability of great software packages in repositories) of Arch.
Debian was the grey beard OS. Those over-30 hippies. So opinionated that you don't even try to say "GUI" to them, or face watching them melt in screaming "I'm melting!!"
This will probably be a minority opinion, but if the choice is between Red Hat cutting off RHEL/CentOS clones, or Red Hat leaving the Linux space as it's become unprofitable due to clones, then I'm fine with what they're doing, purely because RH are one of if not the biggest Linux code contributors and losing them would be a million times worse than losing some CentOS clones.
I think that's unlikely. I can't see "Red Hat leaving the Linux space" in any way. That's basically folding, and considering their impact on IBM's software division I'm not seeing it anytime soon. Particularly when they have a cheaper alternative in the "status quo ante greed".
As someone who has based all their personal and systems at my place of work on Rocky/CentOS/Fedora I am still hesitant to change that. I will probably wait for about 6 months and see how this situation unfolds in the end.
From my understanding, they might be bound by GPL and forcing to pay for a subscription and their added restrictions violates it. We might see some large tech company, like Oracle, sue them for some profit.
I was thinking that too. RedHat is also walking into a legal grey area here by trying to manipulate and alter and reinterpret existing open source licenses on code in their own damn codebase to make it now no longer freely accessible and subject to terms of their developer account agreement. I hope a legal challenge does come out of this and they lose. I'm no lawyer, but they definitely seem to be violating the spirit if not also enforceable legal aspects of open source licenses.
It's perfectly fine to charge for GPL software as long as you also provide the source. But once you sell GPL software the recipient can share it freely if they so choose. Here RH is encouraging customers not to share the code by saying if you do share they won't give you any newer versions.
Sue IBM... 15 years later will the verdict even been relevant (it wasn't in the case with SCO)? The whole notion of 'Enterprise' Linux is absurd. Hire software engineers, not lawyers; you get more for your money.
What's the problem here? The reason CentOS is no longer the same as RHEL is that Oracle was repackaging CentOS and selling support for it, basically cutting the grass under RedHat's foot. That means it reduced their revenue by being a threat to their business model because why would you pay RedHat for RHEL when you can just pay Oracle for support when you need to. CentOS Stream is not 1:1 compatible with RHEL as CentOS was. It's a preview of things to come in RHEL, so in fact you get to play with the latest stuff before RHEL gets it. You should take aim at Oracle rather than RedHat, RedHat is still one of the biggest open source contributors and Oracle is trying to put them out of business without contributing anything.
The reason we don't have CentOS is because Red Hat bought it and shut it down. Not because of anything else. You can imagine all of the justifications you want, but at the end of the day, we lost CentOS because Red Hat acquired it and decided to shut it down. To put my critique of this argument another way: Ubuntu repackages Debian. But we don't see this kind of active hostility from Debian because they know they're building something for the community, and have structured themselves accordingly. Debian's onto something that Red Hat missed- that's the point.
@@VeronicaExplains The comment was more about Oracle, not CentOS. Ubuntu is not a direct copy and paste of Debian, they add and change a lot and do their own thing. RHEL clones are just copy/paste.
Other EL systems are not just copy/paste. There's a lot of work that goes into it, work that Red Hat encouraged until money got in the way. They don't do what Canonical does for Ubuntu/Debian systems, but it's a lot more than someone's hobby clone. The pro-corporate lobby in my comments seems to think that these "clones" are a wholesale ripoff. Tell that to the thousands of devs out there building RHEL software (something which helps Red Hat's "open source" bottom line) and using Rocky or Alma as a dev target. I also don't accept the argument that Oracle shouldn't try to make a buck off of open source software, same as Canonical. Go ahead, but expect the flack if you don't share your source code freely- particularly after advertising for a generation or two that you'd keep it free as a core principle of your corporate culture.
@@VeronicaExplains If there is a lot of work that goes into it, and they aren't just doing a copy and paste, then they have nothing to complain about since all the code in RHEL is in CentOS Stream and available publicly. If they don't need to copy/paste RHEL then they don't need the RHEL source.
I smell a old school fork coming for Red Hat. A year from now we might have a new mainline RPM based Linux distro completely divorced from Red Hat/IBM. Good old boy/gal suit and ties running Red Hat into obscurity. Debian has been king forever it seems.
I'd like to know what Linus Torvalds thinks about it. Especially because he has always been very close to Red Hat and Fedora - far more than to Debian, Ubuntu or others..
Me too, maybe this situation will change his mind. After all he has supported Asahi Linux lately, which IIRC is a community driven distro for M1/M2 Apple PCs.
I stopped using red hat when they created an enterprise version many years ago and changed their focus. I had a feeling they were changing direction and wanted to take advantage of the open source code base and community.
Hi Veronica, I am a Windows user and have never worked on a Linux distribution. I've been following the news on RHEL and I have a basic understanding of the challenges the community is facing. I want to say thanks for explaining the legacy of Red Hat and the significance of an open source ecosystem. Maintaining a Linux distro is sometimes a thankless job, so if you are participating in the development of open source projects like Debian, kudos to you. I too wish there was some way for customers to trust the developers of Red Hat. Good luck on your future projects.
I can't explain how fast I rushed to Flathub when I found out 3D Pinball was available there
wait whaaaaaaaaaaa. ...........................> *runs to flathub*
Pinning a comment in response to the pro-corporate lobby.
Other EL systems are not just copy/paste. There's a lot of work that goes into it, work that Red Hat encouraged until money got in the way. They don't do what Canonical does for Ubuntu/Debian systems, but it's a lot more than someone's "hobby clone".
Some seem to think that these "clones" are a wholesale ripoff. Tell that to the thousands of devs out there building RHEL software (something which helps Red Hat's "open source" bottom line) and using Rocky or Alma as a dev target.
I also don't accept the argument that big companies like Oracle (or even Red Hat) *shouldn't* try to make a buck off of another organization's open source software... in my mind that's similar to what Canonical does with Debian, who are well within their rights to do so. Again, I'm not naive about corporate influence in Linux. Go ahead and write commercial software from open sources, but expect some flack if you don't share your source code freely- particularly after advertising for a generation or two that you'd keep it free as a core principle of your corporate culture.
In short- Debian structured their project in a way that allows a company like Canonical to exist without fighting them in the courts. They figured something out that Red Hat's missed. And that, to me, is a reason to choose Debian.
Also, folks using words like "idiot", "stupid", or the like in response to human beings will get the boot. That's not discourse I care to have. Go ahead and unsubscribe if you don't like it, I don't want your views.
Corporations can ONLY value $$$.
Oh trust me the EL systems do a lot! I can appreciate the amount of work and effort that goes into them. Rocky has contributed numerous tools which are beneficial to the whole ecosystem. One prominent tool being Peridot. Rocky also has great documentation for new users. I'm actually working with the Rocky team on verifying if Stream is capable of creating a good clone or not. Skip Grube and Jon Wright (from Alma) are doing research on the current package drift between the RHEL package set and CentOS Stream git history.
When it comes to Debian I personally don't like the APT package manager. I've had instability issues in the past with it, but other than that I love Debian! Debian has a solid base and if it weren't for apt I think it could be a "sit it and forget it" type of setup.
Also yes it's Andross.
While I don't really know what to think of Red Hat's stance yet and I personally use AlmaLinux as well, I don't agree that clones are not a "wholesale ripoff" (although I wouldn't use that loaded term either). The reason why the clones are popular is exactly what we've been saying for all of these years. It's free RHEL. That's why we like 'em.
The problem with going wholesale into the Debian ecosystem, is frankly that its desktop component is not very good. With the Red Hat ecosystem on the other hand, we have Fedora Linux, which smokes Debian by a mile on the desktop. If you choose to go with the Debian server component, that's fine, but you'll be using a "corporate" Linux on the desktop (Ubuntu or System76) if you want to keep the same analog or be forced to use something that is just plain lackluster (plain Debian). I do feel like Fedora Linux is a bit of an in-between for "corporate" Linux and community Linux.
So basically, you either have to be switching back and forth between Linux distro paradigms, you are using a "corporate" distro, or you are not having a good time. Sorry if I offended desktop Debian fans. This is just my opinion.
I've been waiting a while for Veronica to give her take on this situation. Thank you for this.
Debian and Arch are the future! 😊
btw..
i use debian btw 😂😂
Finally, debian getting that recognition it deserves
I use slackware btw ;)
More like Debian and Nix. Optionally Guix.
Pacman does have some issues which would need to be fixed, like 'forced' updates if you want to Install new updates, which probably won't get resolved anywhere soon.
It may change in the future, but for now I would say it's 4th best of Community driven distros for typical users, and I doubt it will get better.
I appreciate your editing video craftsmanship, it shows that you really enjoy what you do and also the amount of work that you put into this. Thank You, Veronica.
Very well said and I agree 100%. I've been slowly moving my machines back to community distros for years now and this just confirms my mindset. Thanks
CentOS was a community distro. That's what the C stands for. The issue there was it was open to being purchased and the bylaws or whatever allowed for it to be changed. Rocky and AlmaLinux now take up the Enterprise community distro. The question is whether they set the legal entity up to keep it community. AlmaLinux is a spin of CloudLinux and Rocky is from the same dude who created CentOS.
Community-driven is safer. But hey, what's wrong with the medieval liturgic way of maintaning software for distros like Debian? It really copies the worst things of bureaucracy.
Red Hat was my first distro, which I got from a CD included with some computer magazine, way back in the day. One of my evangelical open source buddies predicted Red Hat pulling a stunt like this someday. I think the only thing about this story that might have surprised him was just how long it took.
You "forgot" to mention you laughed at him and considered him a ridiculous freak
@@alastorgdl lmao yeap
“How long it took” yeah you read my mind.
Red Hat was bought out by IBM...I don't think Red Hat would have done this on their own.
RHEL Developer is still free for up to 16 nodes and Fadora is still open
Richard Stallman is probably nodding and muttering, "I told you so."
Yes. He will also be selling jars of his gourmet toenails.
@@musicalneptunian I don't know, where you live, but even in my country (and I know many countries have worse politicians) I would switch most politicians for toenails. For example a guy named Markus Söder. He is way more disgusting than a jar of toenails.
I've recently found my go-to combo for literally 99. (9)% of things that I do: Debian Testing on desktop/laptop, Debian Stable on servers/workstations. I wasn't that happy about software choice for a long time.
Use Gnome on desktops/laptops + flatpaks for things like telegram, remmina etc. Looks good, runs good. Considering there is a proposal to add telemetry to Fedora 40, I've completely lost faith in any corporate-run and corporate-backed distros.
TBH, I would've expected that sort of move more from Canonical. RedHat (before IBM acquisition) was more or less The Good Guy of corporate world. Not just they made rhel code publicly available, they also contributed mostly upstream, letting everyone benefit from their improvements. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain. RIP RedHat I guess.
I am looking at FreeBSD now.
As an admin myself, I've been through so many different distributions it makes my head spin trying to remember them all! I started off with Slackware, then across to RedHat (up until RedHat 9 when they stopped those releases). Then I moved over to OpenSUSE, United Linux (yeah, I am that old), then SLES. The list goes on. But I am interested to hear your views on AWS Linux. It seems to be gaining traction, and does not get hit by RedHat's decision.
The issue is the ability to be binary 1:1 or bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL. AlmaLinux has indicated it will no longer be binary compatible but will be be ABI compatible, which is probably good enough. RockyLinux has said it will still be able to be binary compatible. We'll see. But as an admin with over 400 Linux instances and the need for long term package support, an enterprise distro with clear roadmaps is required. So glad these two are taking it up.
Thank you for such a thought provoking video! I love the humour you bring to your work! As a corporate IP lawyer, I'm interested in observing how this all plays out and whether any other corporate Linux distributions go the same route. Potentially quite a watershed moment in IT.
I am very fortunate that the first distro I used extensively was Debian 5. I loved it and I've used Debian extensively ever since. I've also gotten into Arch since it's what runs on my Steam Deck. Community distros forever!
man, you could turn this story into a mad-lib with how identical it is to what happened recently with Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro and the D&D Open Game License.
Yep. They all follow the same MBA [moronic brainless accountants] formula.
Oh wow, I didn't hear anything about it, deep diving into it rn. Thank you for bringing it up, it is really is eerily similar.
@@hyperfocus94 ...and now Unity, prompting Pillar of Garbage to post video ID xDPPig9JR5Y about techno-feudalism. (See also Cory Doctorow's enshittification cycle.)
I only recently found your channel but I want to say, I appreciate just how tactfully you handle reporting these kinds of topics.
Same here, and it seems the rules/curation of the comments keep things in the sane world. Good content in and out of the video
I think you're right. Oracle, Microsoft and now Rehat all actively working against open source and the wider benefit. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" is exactly what happened to Centos Linux which was originally a community distro, until Redhat took legal ownership and board control.
I'm more into Void Linux than Debian, but I think openSUSE is a good choice too, since it is enterprise backed, but community driven as well. That deserves a honorable mention. I also love the approach they took by focusing on privacy (setting up tight default firewalls), providing their Open Build System for all distros, and also the easy for beginner sysadmins YaST2 Control Panel.
TH-cam just suggested this video to me, as well as your video about PopOS skipping their 23.x releases. I thoroughly enjoyed both, and I have subscribed.
It’s nice to see a voice of civility and whimsy in the FOSS community, when many other channels that discuss Linux seem to be the angry ranty type.
I love the way you ended the video. I too disagree with what RedHat/IBM has done, but I will not stop using Fedora, because it succeeds for me where others have failed on multiple occasions
Yeah I'm in the same boat, no other distro offers an experience that is easy to use + up to date packages without breaking than Fedora does. openSUSE would be a close second and I would use it more if Yast wasn't a thing (I find it too complicated to use and not a fan of having to install stuff from it instead of the Software store)
@@Robotta Hey, Tumbleweeed user here, what have you installed from YaST? In all this time, I've evaded YaST for software installation with 100% success, so it's not obligatory to use. In fact, I've been using Discover more to find new alternatives.
I can understand you finding YaST kind of complicated, but once you give it a look, you can find anything you need in a fast way. I only use it to manage repositories some times and to edit GRUB because it's easier that way.
Oh now you've done it RedHat, look what you did, you disappointed our sweet Veronica. tsk tsk. 😤
LOL @ 7:50. "kdenlive. It's fine!" should be a tee shirt.
I recently switched two of my machines over to Debian 12 (running MATE) and I am really enjoying the experience. The setup process was yards ahead of what it used to be, the distro feels fast, even on my aging ThinkPad T460s, and it feels like I'm doing a good thing for the community. I remember when you could buy copies of RedHat (before the Fedora split and all that) at Kmart back in the '90s; it's a shame to see the direction RedHat has chosen.
I was at my cousin's, early 2000s, and she had just gotten a computer, but it was useless, as it didn't have an os installed.
Went to the magazine shop downstairs, choose one of the live CDs, and boom, she had a working PC!
On one hand, I agree with RedHat
They are the ones, because they are larger than other Linux providers, to resolve bugs faster than other providers. That staff costs!!
On the other hand, the Alma and Rocky and Eurolinux/SUSE/Ubuntu/Oracle distros just take from RH, without giving back.
I have seen only two distros resolving security bugs with original fixes.
For most of the Linux users on TH-cam, and that includes me, I am a hobbyist. I benefit from my 20 years of free Linux and Linux support.
So, how does RH cut costs and stop the pseudo "Piracy"? Do we need to have a very low cost subscription fee to access the bug fixes? Should we be paying some small amount ($5US) for each full distro we download, which will include a year's bugfixes?
If so,.then RH can recover from the RH clones who take, but don't compensate RH for the work done
@@georgH I remember those days well. That and trying to figure out the dot pitch to x serve working properly.
Debian is only useful for enterprise environments.
@@GoatzombieBubba Except that I've been using it in my personal laptop since 2001. and in all my other PCs since 99
How people contextualize Fedora is kind of complicated. Fedora is technically community run, it is just sponsored by Redhat. I think people feel uncomfortable contributing code to/testing Fedora because it benefits Redhat. However, does this not apply to contributing to the linux kernel? Contributing to gnome? Contributing to flatpak?
The Fedora council is, with major positions as RedHat positions. I.E. You apply to get a job at RedHat to sit in those positions.
Fedora is not "just sponsored" by Red Hat, RH completely owns and controls the project. They own all the trademarks, all the infrastructure, and the project is dictated by Red Hat's interests. The biggest decision-makers in Fedora are Red Hat employees.
@@Waitwhat469 Thanks for that context. Wasn't aware of that
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 Thank you. I was under the impression it was community run but simply funded by Redhat.
@@babyboomertwerkteam5662 No they dont.
Thanks Veronica for a really thorough video. I was on PopOS and fully switched to Debian 12 on everything this year, it seems like many people feel like this.
What distinguishes projects like system 76 from redhat etc. is that System76 is Engineering driven company, while RedHat, IBM, Oracle et al. seem to have dropped the ball and now just extract shareholder value from what they already had.
SUSE seems to be committed to the Open Source community through all this. I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, the rolling release community distribution they sponsor. And SUSE just announced yesterday they were forking RHEL.
I'm sure SUSE has a profit motive too, as they're a coporation. But I feel like they're one that I can kind of get behind.
On my laptop, I'm dual-booting between OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and NixOS.
and, they have an appaloosa.
I use it for a gaming desktop. For me it's better than any arch derivative I've seen for that purpose.
@@Nefsen I get the cynicism. I'm just now reading your comment. But yes, SUSE had been sold several times. And yes, I know it
s an attempt to grab customers from Red Hat. As I said, I'm sure there's a profit motive in SUSE's actions.
Still, SUSE is even older than Red Hat and I feel they have an even closer connection.
SUSE is German. I'm not sure if that changes any of the corporate culture by any means, as I don't know German culture all that well. But I assume there would be some differences when dealing with an American corporation like Red Hat. But I have red that Germany has a culture where workers and bosses work together a bit more than most places in the US. So I wonder if this might help SUSE have a different attitude towards open source than American corporations. But I really don't know, TBH.
Still, I liked OpenSUSE before all this. I'm a fan of YAST in particular, and I like Tumbleweed because while it's a rolling release, they do a bit more testing before releasing packages, and they don't break things like Manjaro. :)
I believe openSUSE is community-driven
@@pedrogonzalez5590 it's just as community-driven as Fedora is i.e. it's not.
Thank you, Veronica! Your points helped me to finalize Debian as my next web server. Great work & nicely presented. Thanks again!
What's going on in the Linux distro world is just an echo of what has already been going on in the programming language world: Meta is rewriting Facebook from PHP to Hack (its own corporate language), TH-cam from Python to Go, etc. Corpos feel the need to control more and and extinguish anything community-driven.
My experience of this comes from the Java environment: like when I was searching what IDE is best for Java , all that was happening was IntelliJ IDEA (corporate) punching down on Eclipse (community driven)...
So let's oppose to that, all of us - use community driven software as much as possible.
And that's why stop writing with idea
Go was created at Google, so I'm not surprised that TH-cam would make the switch from Python to Go. In fact, Go is a much better choice (imho).
@@cseale61 yeah idk how go, a language that has been open sourced for 10 years is comparable to a completely closed language
I hear what you're saying, but transitioning from Python to Go is more of a technical decision than a corporate orthodoxy, despite it being Google's own programming language. That's because Go is still considered a toy language just like Python, and yet runs considerably faster than Python. So it's an easy win just on technical merits. I'm not sure what you mean by Eclipse vs IntelliJ, sure one is a commercial tool while the other is not, and in my opinion both are fine text editors. But IntelliJ is a much better developer experience. One could certainly use Vim instead, and many people do.
I'm looking forward to your next video! Wink, wink, hint, hint. I just started digesting the SuSE/openSuSE news yesterday and I was pretty excited right up until the moment I fell asleep with my phone in my hand.
Thank you, Veronica.
After recovering from Solaris, I became a RHEL fanboi but like you, was dismayed to see their recent direction.
You're right about Debian - it just works (usually) - but perhaps we'll hear some horror stories in the comments.
When does rdebian *not* work, please?
@@2501bproject I'm too cowardly to say that something *always* works.
@@2501bproject Actually I tried to spawn a VM using cockpit on it (debian 12) and it failed :(
The same exact setup just works perfectly fine on RHEL, Fedora and even o Ubuntu.
Don't get me wrong, I do like Debian (and used it since 3.0 days), but for me RHEL is working better on my home server.
Been using it since 2001/2002 in my own PCs, laptops and servers.
Compared to Windows at the time, I only had to install it on new computers.
It's great!
@@georgH I had it on my NSLU2 , but they dropped support for it at or around Stretch.
It ran a couple of cameras and another couple of drives through a four way USB hub, all on 32MB of physical memory. It never complained.
I'm more of a FreeBSD man myself, but in years past I always thought pretty highly of RedHat as a company, but when IBM got involved I knew something bad was coming. Where they are now? What a shame. I'd really hoped back in the day they'd give MS a run for their money.
I love and use Debian 12 on multiple systems. I'm a retired school teacher. When I was working I built a computer lab in my classroom using throw away PCs, running Debian 4.0(Etch). The kids loved it. It's sad, but, very predictable about Red Hat. IBM wants to turn a profit on their investment.
Redhat seems to be going all-in on trying to control desktop Linux. Trying to lock out distros like Alma, ditching Xorg, KDE, and Motif. The end goal seems to be try to make desktop Linux strictly Redhat/Wayland/Gnome. There's other stuff they've deprecated seemingly because it competes with their commercial offerings. So yea, it's all about the Benjamins.
2:53 not to mention they didnt built it alone, they had tons of volunteers to help and those might not help if they knew the code would close in the future
Sway is so awesome!!!
Thank you, Veronica. Welcome to the hard core ;)
I've settled on Linux Mint, Debian Edition Version 5 (aka LDME5)
That's essentially Debian 11 (bullseye) + the Cinnamon desktop and apps.
I love it because it feels as smooth and predictable as the classic Mac UI.
Looking forward to LDME6 later this summer...
cool but I hope it wont change?
I just switched from Windows to Linux for the first time, and I'm loving it. I had wanted to try Linux since I was 15 back in 1999, and even bought a boxed distro at CompUSA back then called Storm Linux, I wasn't able to get it working and had to give up and never thought I'd get a chance to use Linux again. Circumstances finally aligned with me getting sick of Microsoft's crap, and I refuse to go to 11, so I downloaded Nobara. It's incredible and I feel just as excited as I did back when I was a kid and teen while using my computer now. Its a life long dream come true.
Now, onto the topic of the video, the idea of Linux becoming commercial is terrifying, I really hope things don't fully go down that path. I hate that so many corporations seemingly control Linux.
Sorry for the essay. I love your channel and look forward to more videos from you!
Being on Debian for years, every day feeling I did the right choice of distro
Hi, Veronica. I enjoyed our conversation this afternoon at Free Geek. (I'm the guy who wrote COBOL for the first 20 years of his professional life and donated the IMSAI (built by me in 1976) to Free Geek. It was good indeed to meet you and I'm happy to be seeing your community-based Linux-oriented channel surviving. Cheers!
Doug Meyer
Hi there! It was great to chat with you, thank you!
I'm glad I found your channel. I've watched a few of your videos and I love how you explain things in a clear, user-friendly way. I've been using computers for 40 years (my first was a Commodore VIC-20, yay!) but I'm relatively new to Linux. My introduction to it has been through the acquisition of vintage ThinkPad machines, essentially, and my favourite setup has been this ThinkPad X301 I acquired recently, that came with CrunchBang++. The experience so far has been enjoyable and hassle-free. I've subscribed to your channel - I'm sure that thanks to you I will learn more things down the road. Cheers! //Rick
great vid. the maniacal laugh is the best. Good for a future career in villainy. Anyway, I've been loving Debian but on my ancient laptop. Instead of going full SID repo on it, I installed (and ran and updated) debian stable (from 10 up to 12) and just took my gpu driver from SID, which sounds like it would be horribly tricky and frought with peril... but actually wasn't. That way, I get the best of both worlds. Nice, rock-solid stable for a laptop I don't need or want to update that often, and can still use its gpu driver (bad overheating with the open source one), and use flatpaks for all the applications I use regularly. It's a great combination.
Cheers for the upload. I'm big on Fedora, and what worries me is this: I know that they're sponsored by Red Hat and they also own the name if I'm not mistaken. What's the worst that could happen with Red Hat's ongoing "We live in a society" mindset? Also it never crossed my mind to pair Debian with Flatpack, it's such a fabulous sight to have the ye ol dusty repo that is built to not break, along with modern Flatpack stuff.
What a great video Veronica. Subbed to your channel.
Not heard a bad word said about Debian 12 so far. Currently use MX Linux based on Debian but may give bookworm a try at some point.
Entertaining video.
Thank you for adding your voice to the issue.
I'm glad you didn't fail to mention IBM's prior failed record as well...
SUSE is issuing their own RHEL distro as well.
Watch till the end. :P
Nice. :)
As an i3 user I'm excited to see your review of sway!
You did the right thing with Debian on the desktop. I have been a Debian user for about 2 decades.
For servers, it's all stable all the time, and I *almost* never enable outside repos.
For my personal desktop, I install and use Testing, as it helps me see the development of the new stable release as it is going. It is a nice balance between the stability and speed of package upgrades in stable and the bleeding edge chaos that can be in Sid on rare occasions. Either option is fine, depending in your level of comfort with Linux.
In all that time, I only had one package that I felt compelled to compile from scratch (as this was before Flatpak, AppImage, or Snaps were a glimmer in the developers' eyes... Gaim/Pidgin. Back when AOL Instant Messenger was still a thing, Debian development wasn't keeping up with the pace of changes to the AIM protocol, so I would compile each new release shortly after Pidgin released it. It was a simple "./configure; make; sudo make install" after getting the dev packages installed the first time. But that was obviously more than a decade ago, seeing as how long AIM has been dead.
The rock solid foundation of Debian is amazing, and I simply spin up docker containers on server with self contained dependencies if I need something up to date.
For personal desktop, depending on the hardware, I'd choose either PopOS with Nvidia driver or simply Ubuntu/Debian with gnome depending on which one downloads faster
Same, been using it since 2001/2002. It freed me from RedHat's rpm hell. Never had to reinstall it, ever.
0:14 “Greedings” lol good one ;)
I'm very happy I've stuck with Debian. I add on what I want and get what I want. It's perfect for my style. If you don't use it, give GNU Screen a shot, to my last knowledge it was better than tmux because you can record sessions from their creation. Tmux used to have the limitation that you only got a log when a successful connection was created. What's nice about the log from spawn of the session is that you can see all failures which helps for troubleshooting in general. Very cool channel, and I agree with your take on Debian. I just use it at home.
debian is the best distro
simple as
ignore archies
I don't care about anything else in life after seeing this lovely dog!
It’s “IBM Red Hat”, “IBM CentOS”, and “IBM Fedora” now folks. Time to jump ship!
The only thing missing from the cackling is "I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too"
Hello Veronica, I love your videos and keep them coming. I had one question, have you considered using the *BSD's for server use?
Yup! And I do use BSDs for servers a bit, actually. Particularly with x86 COBOL where there's some idiosyncrasies around Linux sometimes. Sometimes something old doesn't play nice with systemd and I find that a BSD is just the right thing.
@@VeronicaExplains
Which BSD distribution do you prefer in such cases?
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
I'm running SUSE in one form or another since the slackware days. Somehow I still trust them, maybe because the company changed hands so many times.
LMDE is also possibly a good option, although I haven't tried it, only base Linux Mint, which itself is still community built but based on Ubuntu.
i installed linux mint once and then updated it and it immediately deleted it's own desktop environment lol
And now just weeks after this Fedora devs are talking about "looking into" putting opt-out telemetry on it...
I work in the mid-tier space where we have a growing install base of RHEL servers. I've long found their repo packaging a bit annoying, and recent drama aside, they largely work very well and will for some time. For my personal projects, I've used Debian now for nearly 20 years and wouldn't choose anything else. Stable on servers, testing on desktop. I'm looking forward to hearing more about your recent experiences with Debian.
Do you know systemd is a RH child (trojan)?
I’ll bite. What’s wrong with systemd actually as it is now ie in Debian 12? Or even rhel/fedora?
@@spykezspykez7001 Unix has several very fundamental ideas
And one of them is "one component does ONE thing and does it well"
systemd is the mocking of that principle
It's like you think of USA without the hypocrisy: that's NOT REALLY USA
Bookworm is fairly up to date and a new release will be out next year. I use debian stable for my desktops
@@alastorgdl You do know it's 2024 right? Good God. Init and scripts are not event based and from a different era in time when a Machine was physical and stationary and had maybe 40 packages at the most. Not tens of thousands. Only SystemD or Solaris's XML based event driven init systems can handle containers, images moving from on prem to cloud, cyber security attacks, and even basic configuration changes such as a laptop going to sleep on a corporate network and waking up in a hotel.
You can't do these things with init without evil hacks and whole programs (which should be config files only) in RC files. Change is hard and it is best as an IT professional to get with the program and remain current and relevant. Things like Teraform and SystemD with declaritive and event driven services and processes are how to handle a modern 21st century environment.
Hey I'm new to your channel and new to the Linux community in general, even though I've been a Linux user personally for years now. I just gotta say, I love your content, I love your vibe, I love your passion, I love your outro theme, and most specifically I love your take on this topic! Great video, thanks!
Huawei contribution to Linux particularly Android is huge. Unfortunately, Google banned Huawei from using Android in their phone.
Business kills community projects, Politic kills Business.
Veronica's Disappointed Mom face (in the thumbnail) is world class! Linux is awesome, and so is Veronica.
Debian is so good. I first tried it back in the late '90s. At the time I was familiar with Solaris, HP/UX, RedHat, and Slackware. Debian felt noticeably more reliable, and more professionally put together, than any of those other distributions. I was really surprised at just how solid it was, and how reliably you could install it, then just keep upgrading it as new versions were released. I didn't see a hiccup from it for years. And the consistency with which all of its packages were well documented, followed consistent guidelines, and made the thing a pleasure to work with was very impressive (the only time I've felt a similar level of OS-wide consistency and quality was when I briefly ran FreeBSD, which is also superb).
I still think Debian is a great platform today. I run Pop! on my desktop and laptop, mainly to save me the extra step of configuring a desktop of equivalent quality myself.
I keep going back Kubuntu an OpenSuse for laptops. I have Nobara 38 on the desktop. I'm glad I dont have a business riding on this.
As someone who's been studying IT while in college since 2019, this boils my blood a tad because on one hand it makes linux systems as a whole look bad to people who don't know the whole context.
I'm fine continuing to use Ubuntu and Debian for both desktop and server use. But now I'll be facing barriers for jobs that want people who use and have experiene with RHEL
I think a lot of what Red Hat has done can also be contributed to companies (probably government agencies too, just a hunch) that don't like Open Source, but still want to use Linux Servers. I've worked for companies that, for whatever reason, are insistent on "Closed Source Software" which boggles my mind. I had to tell one company "just because it's Closed Source doesn't make it more secure!" not that that company ever listened to their Devs. Well, they got RHEL as a Closed Source Option now.
One of my new favorite channels. Glad i found it.
I'm never going to be the guy that says Oracle is the good guy in any given situation, but IBM/Red Hat couldn't have done a more perfect job of teeing things up for Oracle to drive one straight down the fairway to LOOK like the good guy without even having to try hard. INCREDIBLY short-sighted of IBM...like, not looking forward past the next quarterly financials. Thanks for the video, I'm agreeing with you regarding Debian...12 has been an awesome release so far, and I'm waiting for the corresponding Raspberry Pi OS to come out in full release based on bookworm.
I have 3 Linux boxes at home and all of them run Linux Mint. I've tried a lot of distros starting with Redhat 5.1. Mint is the best in my books. Easy to install, never breaks and is super stable. I'm no programmer but I just want a machine that works and doesn't bother me with nonsense.
As I get older, I actually have more of an appreciation for For Profit companies. At the same time, I have less appreciation for Publicly Traded companies which seem to be the ones making all the bad decisions, probably because it's not the owners of those companies who get to make all of the decisions, but the shareholders.
Yeah I don't have a problem with a company making a profit and there are some non-profit companies that can be more of a scam and hide behind the non-profit flag or a way to get tax free status. But I just like the company to be well-behaved and not underhanded. The publicly traded ones have to be watched like a hawk.
I like your plasma layout. It really is well optimized for good screen real estate in my opinion. I like thin status/menu bar on top and dock on the left. It gives more vertical space.
Similar to Debian, you could also look at one of the other "founding fathers" of Linux: Slackware... and the easier-to-use derivative, Salix OS! I've done research recently and am really impressed with Salix for many reasons, and will definitely be installing it on one of my laptops soon.
Edit: Does anyone have experience using Nitrux OS? I see it is Debian-based, but uses OpenRC instead of systemd(another controversial corporate product coming from Red Hat...) and with an immutable root...
What are the differences between regular Slackware and Salix?
What I observed is a increasingly lower stability. 15 years ago, Slackware was rock solid and ultra responsive. Versions 14.x were extremely shaky for me. 15.0 is better but Firefox can crash X and sometimes entire system, which was unthinkable in 10-12 times. Have you observed the same?
@@alastorgdl I used Slackware a long time ago, and it was my primary Linux system due to its simplicity and stability, but then I ended up using various Red Hat based/derived Linux systems for some time, and over the last few years I used only Windows. Now I'm in the process of ditching Windows and moving back to Linux... so I've been testing a few options and doing research about the current state of Linux distros, with various pros and cons that accompany them. From that research I discovered Salix OS, and has been impressed with what I've read about it. It is apparently 100% backward compatible with Slackware, and the additional repositories that Salix provides can also be used with vanilla Slackware. Salix does however have some additional tools to make things easier for people who do not have the time or patience to do everything "by hand". E.g. Salix includes some GUI tools such as the Gslapt frontend for package management from various sources, including multiple repositories and Slackbuilds. It also claims to have "sysvinit-scripts Tweaked for boot speedup", "optimized for desktop usage", "high quality package repositories with dependency support", "incredibly fast package tools", ...
You've got me worried now, when you say that Slackware is no longer as stable as it used to be... that is precisely why I was looking at going back to it... So should I rather use Debian? I would really prefer to not have the bloat and big-tech "sponsored" systemd and similar "we know what is best for you" systems :) Unfortunately that rules out vanilla Debian, as it is only available with systemd. That (and because of the added immutability feature) has gotten me quite interested in Nitrux (Debian-based, but uses OpenRC init). I've used two non-systemd Linux systems (Artix and Void) and I definitely prefer them over Fedora, for example. Artix does however have much fewer software packages available than Arch and many other distros, unless you add the Arch repos to it and risk dependency / compatibility problems. Void is nice and their documentation is excellent, but I would prefer to use a system with more established roots, such as a Debian / Slackware based one, as binaries are more often available for such systems than for the "new kids on the block".
Arch user here. I started in 1996 with Slackware 3.0 (2-CD set) and I noticed along the years how dynamic things are comparing Linux to other operating systems (especially Windows). What I really enjoy on Linux is its flexibility: you may have a server, a workstation, a NAS or even some hardware based on ARM, all running based on the same (free and open) sources.
Speaking about Red Hat move, it might be related to Microsoft and their "partnership" regarding Azure. I know it's a wild guess and I have no good reason to "believe" my hunch is right.
Thanks for the video!
I hope that we as a community learn our lesson. Corporations will always sabotage open source.
And fund a majority of it.
@@benblasco Embrace extend extinguish baby 😎
@@LillyAnarkitty pure FUD.
@@benblasco Okay Bill Gates.
@@benblascothe fact you unironically said “FUD” SAYS A LOT ABOUT YOU
5:35 the real problem is 10 year LTS - debian does not have it - i've been told of a Debian ELTS payed project and asked a quote but probably it will end up in crazy prices
Another great video vkc! It seems like Debian is the future, Ubuntu is starting to get a bit weird too, I wish there were more distros based on Slackware aswell. My home is Crunchbangplusplus with Debian stable/preconfigured Openbox. CBPP stopped my chronic distro-hopping journey.
Fedora all the way here. If it's good enough for Linus Torvalds, it's good enough for me..!
@@TestGearJunkie. According to Torvald he has never tried Debian or he found it hard to install (this was back in the days).
@@AceOfBased Same here, I just didn't get on with it. It might be my imagination, but the security on the version I tried sucked.
@@TestGearJunkie. I get it, but Debian 12 should not be hard.. just saying. :)
@@AceOfBased The command line structure is different, been using Fedora since v10 and I'm too stuck in my ways 😁
I would be interested to see how you feel about SUSE, the company and also the Distro, specifically tumbleweed. They have pledged to stay open and so far I think they have been true to the people. I felt the same way about RHEL a few years ago though...
I felt disappointed about the situation and what made it worse was my first distro was the original Red Hat 7.3 (before Fedora and RHEL). But the Malevolent piece cracked me up lol.
I am here for you. Rhel and fedora was my home.
That was an EXCELLENT wicked witch laugh with Red Hat on. That should go viral!!
Thank you for the great update, the passion for Community, the humor, and all the Toor(s) of distros.
We appreciate you and best wishes on your basement.
The main things I like about Pop (on a ThinkPad laptop) are the frequency and ease of installing firmware updates and the tiling windows that can be dragged into place without having to memorize vim keybindings (and which at the flip of a switch can be floating). Is this native in Gnome or KDE yet for easy install on Debian?
I don't think it's native on debian yet
Epic double commenting lol, as I'm really starting to appreciate the Linux ecosystem, I feel like I may even be able to contribute to Debian in some ways? I should definitely see how this all works!
I think between that, and the massive push Valve Software is doing with the Steam Deck and it's contributions to the kernel and arch and wine and well pretty much a lot of things lol, we're maybe witnessing the beginning of a new golden age for Linux without even realizing it!
If ONLY Wayland was more ready... I'm impatient I admit it!
So you switched your video editing system to Debian sid. I've been considering sid as well while using btrfs, grub-btrfs, and snapper to enable easy system snapshotting and rollbacks in the grub boot menu in the event of a bad update - in bsd speak, I think they call them "boot environments". Should be a good strategy for arch as well, or any rolling distro. Perhaps a video on this subject?
I have been using RHEL and (even more) AlmaLinux for a while. The OS itself is actually absurdly stable and very good to use in a server environment. This change has led me to question if I should even keep going with RHEL itself or AlmaLinux on my systems since we can’t fully predict where Red Hat is going with this.
RHEL as an OS is stable and predictable. Redhat as a company... isn't.
So... Kinda funny. We have been using Debian as our default Linux OS for years now in our organization. We've been experimenting with Ansible for about a year now, and were considering moving to RHEL. In fact we acquired a small subscription to POC it. Might need to reconsider that plan...
We are required by clients and auditors require us to have vendor support. We used to use CentOS for development, testing, UAT and staging. For production environments used RHEL with paid support. We switched to Ubuntu when Red Hat killed down stream CentOS. Best choice we made.
thank you.. You are the YT'er that I am going to recommend to my retired aunt whom I am trying to get to use Linux. Btw, what do you think of Arch as a distribution for daily usage? Any good arch clone to recommend for a hassle free life? I was in love with CentOS, till it was altered irreparably by IBM/RedHat. For now it is Rocky Linux, but I see a situation where I have to move on from RHEL based systems - so openSuse (though they are controlled by a company too), Gentoo, Slackware, Debian and Arch. I am not sure which one of Arch and Debian to go for, as I have heard lot of good things (particularly the availability of great software packages in repositories) of Arch.
Open Suse remaining the good guy business lizzard
Debian was the grey beard OS. Those over-30 hippies. So opinionated that you don't even try to say "GUI" to them, or face watching them melt in screaming "I'm melting!!"
This will probably be a minority opinion, but if the choice is between Red Hat cutting off RHEL/CentOS clones, or Red Hat leaving the Linux space as it's become unprofitable due to clones, then I'm fine with what they're doing, purely because RH are one of if not the biggest Linux code contributors and losing them would be a million times worse than losing some CentOS clones.
I think that's unlikely. I can't see "Red Hat leaving the Linux space" in any way. That's basically folding, and considering their impact on IBM's software division I'm not seeing it anytime soon. Particularly when they have a cheaper alternative in the "status quo ante greed".
As someone who has based all their personal and systems at my place of work on Rocky/CentOS/Fedora I am still hesitant to change that. I will probably wait for about 6 months and see how this situation unfolds in the end.
From my understanding, they might be bound by GPL and forcing to pay for a subscription and their added restrictions violates it. We might see some large tech company, like Oracle, sue them for some profit.
I was thinking that too. RedHat is also walking into a legal grey area here by trying to manipulate and alter and reinterpret existing open source licenses on code in their own damn codebase to make it now no longer freely accessible and subject to terms of their developer account agreement. I hope a legal challenge does come out of this and they lose. I'm no lawyer, but they definitely seem to be violating the spirit if not also enforceable legal aspects of open source licenses.
It's perfectly fine to charge for GPL software as long as you also provide the source. But once you sell GPL software the recipient can share it freely if they so choose. Here RH is encouraging customers not to share the code by saying if you do share they won't give you any newer versions.
Sue IBM... 15 years later will the verdict even been relevant (it wasn't in the case with SCO)? The whole notion of 'Enterprise' Linux is absurd. Hire software engineers, not lawyers; you get more for your money.
That screenshot that SUSE will fork Red Hat blew my mind... wow
What's the problem here? The reason CentOS is no longer the same as RHEL is that Oracle was repackaging CentOS and selling support for it, basically cutting the grass under RedHat's foot. That means it reduced their revenue by being a threat to their business model because why would you pay RedHat for RHEL when you can just pay Oracle for support when you need to. CentOS Stream is not 1:1 compatible with RHEL as CentOS was. It's a preview of things to come in RHEL, so in fact you get to play with the latest stuff before RHEL gets it. You should take aim at Oracle rather than RedHat, RedHat is still one of the biggest open source contributors and Oracle is trying to put them out of business without contributing anything.
The reason we don't have CentOS is because Red Hat bought it and shut it down. Not because of anything else. You can imagine all of the justifications you want, but at the end of the day, we lost CentOS because Red Hat acquired it and decided to shut it down.
To put my critique of this argument another way: Ubuntu repackages Debian. But we don't see this kind of active hostility from Debian because they know they're building something for the community, and have structured themselves accordingly. Debian's onto something that Red Hat missed- that's the point.
@@VeronicaExplains The comment was more about Oracle, not CentOS. Ubuntu is not a direct copy and paste of Debian, they add and change a lot and do their own thing. RHEL clones are just copy/paste.
Other EL systems are not just copy/paste. There's a lot of work that goes into it, work that Red Hat encouraged until money got in the way. They don't do what Canonical does for Ubuntu/Debian systems, but it's a lot more than someone's hobby clone.
The pro-corporate lobby in my comments seems to think that these "clones" are a wholesale ripoff. Tell that to the thousands of devs out there building RHEL software (something which helps Red Hat's "open source" bottom line) and using Rocky or Alma as a dev target.
I also don't accept the argument that Oracle shouldn't try to make a buck off of open source software, same as Canonical. Go ahead, but expect the flack if you don't share your source code freely- particularly after advertising for a generation or two that you'd keep it free as a core principle of your corporate culture.
@@VeronicaExplains If there is a lot of work that goes into it, and they aren't just doing a copy and paste, then they have nothing to complain about since all the code in RHEL is in CentOS Stream and available publicly. If they don't need to copy/paste RHEL then they don't need the RHEL source.
I smell a old school fork coming for Red Hat. A year from now we might have a new mainline RPM based Linux distro completely divorced from Red Hat/IBM. Good old boy/gal suit and ties running Red Hat into obscurity. Debian has been king forever it seems.
Debian rules!
Thanks, Veronica, for this information ... Wish you lots of success in your business and life choices.
I've never trusted Red Hat, and I never will. I could never forgive them for the death of my boy.
A+ comment. David Marcus would be proud.
Excellent video!
Your videos are so informative, creative, and entertaining!
If you're not the customer....
... you're responsible for joining the worker owned co-op.
Here here!
This is my first time watching Veronica, and I really like her. Subscribed
I'd like to know what Linus Torvalds thinks about it. Especially because he has always been very close to Red Hat and Fedora - far more than to Debian, Ubuntu or others..
Me too, maybe this situation will change his mind. After all he has supported Asahi Linux lately, which IIRC is a community driven distro for M1/M2 Apple PCs.
I stopped using red hat when they created an enterprise version many years ago and changed their focus. I had a feeling they were changing direction and wanted to take advantage of the open source code base and community.
I’m glad I’m still ok to use a pop os
Hi Veronica, I am a Windows user and have never worked on a Linux distribution. I've been following the news on RHEL and I have a basic understanding of the challenges the community is facing. I want to say thanks for explaining the legacy of Red Hat and the significance of an open source ecosystem. Maintaining a Linux distro is sometimes a thankless job, so if you are participating in the development of open source projects like Debian, kudos to you. I too wish there was some way for customers to trust the developers of Red Hat. Good luck on your future projects.