I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It’s only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that’s what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it’s time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn’t go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal… is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about “hey we are considering this, what do y’all think?”. Well, they’re certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it’s a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like “does anyone even use this” or “how reliable is this feature” can help them prioritize their efforts.
I’ll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there’s problems. I’m sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points… or you think I’m on Red Hat’s payroll (I’m not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I’m a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I’m not planning to change that anytime soon.
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Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I’m honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I’ve used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don’t see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
As someone who hasn’t really been following, what anti-user decisions are those?
Source code distribution change is the big one now, on top of getting rid of traditional centos: https://news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-restricts-source-code/
I don’t really see them as anti-user, in the sense that if you are a subscriber your position has never changed and they are happy to provide support in exchange for money. They do restrict your ability to redistribute (they threaten to cancel your subscription) which I am not a fan of.
Fedora is also looking at adding telemetry. They are calling it opt-in but also defaulting the checkbox to “on”, at least in discussions.
You know what’s funny? Most of the time, when something asks me to opt in for telemetry, I strongly consider doing so, then look into what’s collected and end up deciding I’m okay with it.
But when I have to opt out, or the default is selected to opt in, I just lose trust entirely.
And I’ll jump through hoops to block anything I can’t replace that doesn’t even ask.
Like, I totally understand why some telemetry is necessary for continued development. I’m down with that. But the shadier it is, the less willing I am to allow it.
I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.
My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.
Does it crash?
Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?
Can I use it and install it offline?
Does my software work?
So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.
Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can’t do that I’ll migrate over to Debain for the stability.
Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.
It inspired me to move on. I’m running OpenSUSE now. I don’t really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I’m out.
I switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don’t regret it until now.
By default you can always roll back to the last working version from boot menu.
I don’t see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That’s on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn’t I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it’s not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn’t I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I’ve almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it’s just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that’s just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say “opt out” it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.
I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan…but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.
Firmware is software.
Firmware is software.
Debatable.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it’s physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let’s say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don’t have answers to these. I’m saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what’s software, what’s firmware and what’s hardware.
Fair point…but it seems the Debian stuff being included in their images is all software.
Hey Zucca, I’ve not been around fgo much since around the time otw vanished but remember you from there and I’m still a happy portage user.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there’s Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
I don’t doubt that relying on Red Hat’s code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody’s “relying” on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It’s FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn’t give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat’s recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn’t help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn’t be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn’t like systemd. After a public democratic decision making process, a decision was made. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don’t understand why you’re talking about disagreements as if they’re the end of the world. “Publically painful”? What does that mean? Debian isn’t a politican. Lennart issuing ‘wake-up calls’ to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it’s usability.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat’s technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it’s not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn’t be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn’t understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you’re a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you’re making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stableis not the only debian release.Yes, and?
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don’t know much about KDE at all.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
I suffer with systemd
What’s the problem?
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I’m lazy. Fedora was the only ‘just works’ option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn’t actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn’t get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘just worked’ in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don’t plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Raspberry Pi OS has the same advantage as macOS - both OSes are meant to be run on specific hardware, so everything should just work. ;)
Since you’ve been playing with RPi, have you tried Alpine Linux?
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I’m not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.
Very
Not even a little bit.
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole “Opt-out” telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and “open” nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for “Opt-out only” telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I’ve done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
Personally, at this point I don’t fully understand why someone would choose to use Fedora over something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s such a fantastic, rolling-release distro, that’s super stable, easy to work with, has some amazing tools to work with it for more experienced users (YaST), and now it also means you aren’t involving yourself in the chain-of-FUD that is arising due to RHEL’s incompetence.
I need to use fedora because it’s the near OS with bleeding edge, aside from RHEL that I work daily. Just matter of convenient. I don’t know, SUSE/OpenSUSE seems not for me.
I was using Fedora because I needed Appgate for work, and a Mullvad rpm was a bonus. Neither of those are compatible with openSUSE, so I’m back on Arch (btw). Tumbleweed was my first distro, and I’m always looking for an excuse to go back.
I’m choosing to divest and look for more opportunities to help community ran distros to better fill that niche. Maybe NixOS or Guix as system os and rke2 and flatpak for the rest of services and apps.
When kernel-0.96 came public, i checked it out on my Amiga as it was released for Motorola chips as m68k … and still is :)
Then RedHat came with their first distro, so i had it running on a Motorola 68060 for some time. It was the swap from i386 to i686 and later, with Vesa local bus, my Amiga lost the performance race. Then, a good friend gifted me an i686 PC. WindowsXP was on it and boah, what a crazy shit that was. Filenames and libraries had stupid names and in a file hirarchy, everything was just dumb there, so installed RedHat on that and since then it was all good.
Fedora came, RedHat closed their enterprise buisness sector and then we had Fedora. Up until doday im using it and enjoy the community, wich has a very scientific and innovative spirit. Fedora was always one of those distros, going new ways on a stable and solid base, thanks to RedHat.
Even if RedHat would drop out completely with their Fedora support - wich will never happen - Fedora would be mature enuff to survive. Should Fedora nontheless go for another path wich im not happy with, ill change, but it does not look like that
So nope, im not worried a single bit^^
I consider it dead and am thankful that I don’t use it.
