woelkchen

Lenovo makes great computers.

Used to. No longer.

The plus side of this is that there’s not the Android situation where you just won’t get OS updates at some point. The downside is that the 1GHz Intel CPU is trash.

And this is why I choose Debian…

You mean the distribution where Canonical has in the past outright bought votes to align Debian closer to Ubuntu? If you think I’m making shit up, look up the fiasco that led to the insanely protracted (roughly a year) very public debate about making Upstart the default init system. Here’s a tldr from a German IT website:

Besides SysV Init, which is currently used by Debian, there is Systemd, which is mainly developed by Red Hat, Canonical’s own Upstart, and OpenRC, which is developed by Gentoo. Only Systemd and Upstart are believed to have a chance. It is unlikely that SysV Init will remain, OpenRC cannot keep up with Upstart or Systemd in terms of technology and innovation. More and more Linux distributions are turning to Systemd, while Upstart is currently used exclusively by Canonical, after Red Hat used it for RHEL 6 and Fedora 9, but is relying on Systemd for RHEL 7.

The two committee members who have already made their opinions known are former Canonical employee Ian Jackson and Russ Allbery. While Jackson favors Upstart, Allbery is clearly in favor of Systemd. Two other members, Colin Watson and Steve Langasek, both employed by Canonical, will probably only support Upstart. The other members are Don Armstrong, Andreas Barth and Keith Packard, newly elected to the committee, as well as chairman Bdale Garbee.

Original: https://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/20622/debatte-um-das-init-system-bei-debian-8-h%C3%A4lt-an.html Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version).

It’s now less public but Canonical still has its tentacles in Debian with Snap and such.

SUSE is independent again

MicroFocus selling SUSE to an investment firm is hardly making SUSE independent.

Now that it’s back to being independent German they are putting new focus on Linux desktop.

Great. Mind linking to announcements about hiring desktop developers? Browsing through jobs.suse.com I found two job ads about container-related software engineers in Taiwan. That’s neither desktop nor German.

Don’t use Fedora or it’s ilk for starters.

Fedora doesn’t make Red Hat any money anyway. That’s like saying to not use Debian because that could help Canonical’s Snap vehicle Ubuntu. For now Fedora is mostly unaffected by Red Hat’s weird moves. As a long time openSUSE user myself, I’m somewhat experienced in using a community distribution sponsored by a company that got worse and worse over the years and I definitively would not want to buy SUSE Linux Enterprise ever. Weirdly enough, openSUSE even got better as a consequence of some of SUSE’s moves. Fewer employed upstream contributors led to the very automated QA and release processes of Tumbleweed, the rolling release distribution. If you have read about problems within openSUSE because of SUSE, it’s about Leap, the LTS variant practically nobody uses because TW is just so stable and good. If Red Hat or SUSE ever go totally mad and torpedoed Fedora / openSUSE, both projects have enough safeguards in place to move the projects into independence with little interruption.

Canonical seem allergic against helping out upstream projects. They rather make their own software, licensed in a specific way that they have exclusive rights to sell proprietary versions. Usually those in-house projects fail and Canonical starts freeloading Red Hat-developed software. That’s why they moved from Unity to Gnome. It’s just easier and cheaper to port bug fixes from the competitor’s product. Canonical was actually caught filing bug reports at Red Hat: https://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html (they tested if a bug also affected Fedora, then they asked Red Hat to fix the bug upstream. I guess they use fake names now but otherwise continue the practice)

My question above was specifically about Debian, since I’ve heard the point of it being community based used negatively in other places/threads too.

Fun fact: For a few years HP was very invested in Debian because they saw that as the most likely successor to their old HP-UX Unix on mainframe servers.

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If we nees to support a corporation with our money, it is in SUSE that we must place our hope.

SUSE fired almost all upstream contributors a decade or so ago. They used to employ 10-20 KDE developers, about the same number of GNOME developers, a bunch of OpenOffice developers (their Go-OO variant of OpenOffice served as base for LibreOffice), and maintained Mono. As much as I personally like openSUSE TW (IMO it’s the best rolling release distribution), SUSE as a corporate entity is worse than Red Hat under IBM. If you think Red Hat under IBM is bad, look up what SUSE having been a Novell subsidiary and then getting sold two additional times did to them. Red Hat would need cancel upstream contributions for so much more to come down to the level of SUSE. A company looking for enterprise Linux support is still best served with Red Hat. Pretty much the entire competition was freeloading off Red Hat’s work. After shutting down their entire desktop department, SUSE was left with a few packagers and two or so people who developed GNOME extensions.

As I wrote in another comment: The company most interested in helping out upstream projects with desktop focus is Valve, not only via their own developers but also by contracting Collabora and Blue Systems. Given how Valve’s update cycle of SteamOS is, those contributions will mostly still land first in “regular” Linux distributions such as openSUSE TW or Fedora, though. It’s a lucky coincidence that Valve developed and released Steam Deck but they are also mostly just interested in the plumbing and Plasma Desktop itself, not applications (unless it’s about apps SteamOS developers use and they need to scratch their own itches though bug fixes). So Bluetooth an power management: sure. Music players: no.

All these corporations looking to kill off their own relevance. They all in the same death cult or something?

IBM uses mostly Windows in house, so they are not interested in desktop Linux and apparently then nobody else would be either.

Yes, it will but so slowly and further down the road, nobody at IBM will see the connection. When Fedora (or desktop Linux in general) will be slightly less appealing to people who in 10 years will become the decision makers at IT departments, it’ll weaken the position of Linux and in turn the commercial support providers.

Guess, everyone who does not yet own a Steam Deck needs to get one because Valve seems to be the biggest commercial proponent of consumer GNU/Linux.

pop_OS is a de-crapified Ubuntu remix. It’s not a stand-alone distribution. For most packages pop_OS is reliant on Canonical, including graphics drivers. So if you want to use it for gaming and have and AMD or Intel GPU and not an NVidia one, you’ll have to stick to Ubuntu’s outdated Mesa and kernel drivers. For gaming on AMD/Intel GPUs, something along the lines of EndeavourOS or Fedora should be a better choice. If you use a GeForce, pop_OS should be OK.

XFS is rock solid and still has active development going on, so why not.

Darrick nominated Chandan Babu of Oracle to handle release management for XFS

Oracle? 🤨 Oh boy…

Whatever Red Hat is doing with Enterprise Linux has luckily no direct effect on Fedora which in itself is a great distribution, so this is a good step.

Just tried clicking that link, and got a huge pop up refusing me access to the site, and accusing me from being from a site called Hacker News (???).

According to the text in the screenshot you’ve posted, there is no referrer header, so perhaps you’re using some privacy extension that strips referrers.

“contributor license agreement” is such a broad term, a CLA is not bad in all cases. There are plenty of CLAs that are not about one-way proprietarization of software. Examples of OK CLAs are “You agree that you actually have the right to contribute code” or “If you don’t specifically attach add a license header, the MIT license is being used”.

Obviously companies like Canonical use the term CLA to make their practices look less shady that it actually is.

Despite their recent crappy moves, Red Hat ist still the largest FOSS contributor.

Signal can block voice messages? How?