It never sat well with me that Red Hat was owned by IBM. This shouldn't be surprising given one of IBM's clients in the 40s.
I won't switch my big PC off bazzite yet, but I have a thinkpad running Fedora I could switch to Arch to finally try out. Heck, it could probably get away with vanilla debian
I have mostly used Fedora derivatives and NixOS over the last few years. I resent corporate involvement in Linux but I accepted it as the cost of top-tier support and maintenance. I’d just avoid the worst offenders, like Ubuntu. However with all of the military industrial ties coming to light, with Red Hat doing this shit alongside its government work, and Nix having ties to Anduril, I’m giving up corporate distros completely. And with systemd capitulating and adding supporting code for the age-verification legislation, I’m looking to get away from that too. I don’t mean to fear monger, systemd and distros including it don’t have age verification or attestation yet, but they’re clearly working towards it.
I would love to use Auxolotl and Lix to keep things declarative and deterministic, but they just aren’t ready yet. Migrating my PCs to Artix this week, and my server to Devuan. Gonna do my configuration with Ansible to retain a sense of declarative config. These projects have their own problems but they’re much more dedicated to resisting surveillance and protecting user sovereignty, which is a must for me.
Damn. Is it really just Debian and Arch that don't have skeletons in their closet?
I dunno I've never seen any valid criticism of slackware.
Gentoo seems above-board.
I've got Bedrock running both Arch and Gentoo. Here's hoping Bedrock is okay....
I'm not a Linux newbie, but I do hate having to compile and install and generally "be a tech guy" about my casual gaming and writing computer.
So I just use Linux Mint. I know, I know: it's Debian, you've probably got many Linux User thoughts about it. But several folks were like "what will I suggest to the normie's now?" Mint. Get them on Mint, it's easy, well supported, and rarely gives me trouble.
Plus, they're not doing war crimes (that I know of!)
Mint is good. I feel like the attitude of pressuring people into the less accessible versions (Mint -> Debian, Manjaro -> Arch) has become less of a thing with the ubiquity of SteamOS.
I have mixed successes with Mint but when it works and when it's on well supported hardware it is a nice convenient distro. I hesitate to suggest it because I've recommended it to people who had a horrible time with it.
It's so hard to recommend distros.
Mint is good. It has good defaults for normies.
I use Arch btw
Debian stays winning.
Is there anything else that has smooth installation, vanilla GNOME, and a good balance of stability and updates? I stopped distro hopping after I found Fedora because it was perfect for me 
Use Ubuntu or stay on Mint. (really, they are fine, I have been around long enough for when the hyped distro for new users was Mint instead of Ubuntu). No one hypes the stuff that works like OpenSUSE (well, someone mentioned it to you, think it's a good distro but they are EU Red Hat).
As far as traditional style distros, I have always been impressed with OpenSuse Tumbleweed when I've needed like polished "corporate ready" distro.
They build and maintain the distros and build tools etc. In particular OpenSuse was the first distro I used that offered to set up BTRFS filesystem snapshots and rollback support as part of the GUI installer. A lot of corpo / consultancy money goes into keeping it competitive and fairly slick. Same as Redhat really.
A real shame. I do think there are other OSes with the same level of polish as Fedora, but not ones as "normie-friendly" to recommend to people.
It may come across as piling on now that there's blood in the water, but quality control in Fedora has slipped recently. The update to 43 caused me some mild inconvenience (compared to a seamless experience in the past) and when my brother did it this week we ended up reinstalling, only to discover TWO bugs in the installation process (one caused by improper handling of Btrfs subvolumes, one caused by a bug somewhere in the nouveau-mesa-Gtk pipeline, neither with useful error messages).
These recent experiences have given me some reservations aside from the politics of IBM/Red Hat.
Yeah tbf I only use Fedora for VMs and to recommend to non-technical people so I'm not the best judge of its quality. But my experiences of it have been smooth + no complaints from the non-technical folks I've recommended Fedora to who have gone through and installed it.
The other OSes that come to mind when I think of well-crafted OSes are Alpine Linux, OpenBSD, and maybe Void Linux, but here "well-crafted" does not mean they appeal to the same audience or fill the same niche as Fedora haha. I guess I can see how Debian is doing these days for next time a non-technical person asks me for a Linux distro rec.
Yeah tbf I only use Fedora for VMs and to recommend to non-technical people so I'm not the best judge of its quality. But my experiences of it have been smooth + no complaints from the non-technical folks I've recommended Fedora to who have gone through and installed it.
This has been my experience more or less for the past decade. I moved to Gentoo on my desktop in 2020 so I could have better control of all the bells and whistles (trying to balance web dev, game dev, ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, GIS, and gaming on one machine), but up to today Fedora has been what I run on anything I don't want to fuck around with (like a laptop that I want to stow for a couple months, update the night before a trip, and not deal with any bullshit when I should be packing). I've also set it up for a few coworkers in addition to my brother, and they've been fine. I was truly shocked to hit so many problems in the installer this go-around. It is very uncharacteristic of my experience overall.
M'Lai Massacre
Oh and when I say ""i have been saying" I mean since the early 2000s btw.
And older archive of that page, but I don't think much has changed in the text since its an old blog post from 2012: https://archive.ph/7GBl4
accusations / discourse from 2014: https://fossforce.com/2014/01/red-hat-working-nsa/
systemd
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
(lol redhat's consultancy wing's gitlab instance got pwnt by a crew called Crimson Collective at the end of last year - I'm guessing there are some really interesting clients in the data set. lol based they just found leaked auth tokens with trufflehog. that's so funny)
With Red Hat Device Edge Lockheed Martin is leading the infusion of cutting-edge commercial technology into military capabilities that deliver advanced solutions to our customers.
Justin Taylor, Vice President, F-22 technology, Lockheed Martin
this sentence should be enough to drop red hat instantly
This is so much worse than I expected. They seemed to be actively pivoting to a Palantir-esque "yeah, we're the bad guys" strategy, but are chickening out a bit on broadcasting it.
"grey"hat to the max. disgusting.
Their hat is red from the blood.
I have been saying that Fedora is THE GUY for doing linux in bed with the US government. It's always the first distro to push to mainstream new tantalizingly convenient technologies developed by their pet devs replacing well understood code that's had thousands of eyeballs on it over the years.
I don't fuck with Fedora. I considered them fairly benign-to-positive back when I was less of a hardliner, but these days I consider them to be sucking the good will, talent and money out of the industry, sitting in an incumbent role as a commercial contractor that could be served by a thousand smaller local companies.
BDS the shit out of them. Redhat was cool back in the day, thanks for that, now move out of the way.
It's a fuckin shame because Fedora is genuinely the most stable and functional distro I've used since moving to Linux. It feels like a polished product.
Then again, it feels like a product from an American corporate machine that gets away with it because they're marginally better than their competitiors (see: Valve Inc. and Steam).
And then what? we have Ubuntu derivatives (another US state asset). Debian is potentially close to a stable user distro that isn't as deeply entrenched in the imperial core. But then surely any distro is under the thumb of the fascists? Linux is de facto property of Intel, Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and a bunch of other CIA fronts.
Not to shit on boycotting Redhat or Fedora, but I just wonder how many steps of separation it is from Linux and its own evils.
People on the FEDiverse almost convinced me to switch from NixOS to FEDora because NixOS is too problematic.
Linux Maoist standard english lol.
NixOS is also dependent on Microsoft GitHub and AWS for infrastructure and have zero plans to address this.
I guess I won't be recommending Fedora anymore. Holy shit.
So, which distro should I switch to from Fedora?
I switched for the same reason long ago and I only used it because it was more up to date than Debian. Now I use Solus. It's a curated rolling release with a weekly cycle. Pretty good so far, not much issues.
Solus
I had no idea this is where Budgie came from. How long have you been using Solus?
Do you use your computer for anything obscure or interesting?
Are you trying to do enthusiastic linux nerd stuff or do you want something that just works and is (relatively, hopefully) easy?
I'm a filthy casual who seeks something that just works without me constantly trying to find and solve what broke each time.
Feels weird to keep recommending it, but https://www.opensuse.org/ OpenSuse Tumbleweed is regularly updated (rolling release) and nicely packaged for end users.
Suse is another old linux consulting powerhouse so you can expect a similar level of polish to Red Hat stuff.
Its default settings include a good modern filesystem that supports taking snapshots and rolling back, which is very useful if you run into a problem after updating a lot of software and you just need to revert to your system's previous state instead of fixing the issue immediately. Or if you're about to do something weird with your computer and you want to save a snapshot for whatever reason.
I'll keep thinking and pondering to see if I can get a bit more variety in my suggestions.
Random roughly organised thoughts in general about this though:
Obviously you can try almost any distro out using a live USB installer before actually installing the system. This is handy if you wanted to try something like Manjaro which is supposed to be a more user friendly version of Arch Linux with a nice installer and stuff, so you can have a play around and see whether the OS is capable of cooperating nicely with your computer.
A rule of thumb with live distros is they are built for maximum compatibility so sometimes they will have full driver and/or software support for hardware that isn't installed by default when you install the OS to the computer, so don't get too attached to anything you play with and be prepared to try a couple of distros if you decide against one of the super user friendly desktop distros.
Low key though and I hope nobody on hexbear dot net sees me tell you this. Running Fedora on your computer at home doesn't really provide any support to red hat the company and its government and military shit. It is also unlikely that they are overtly backdooring their distro specifically (its more likely/true to say that they have helped backdoor almost all distros via systemd.) So if you can't find an alternative that works for you, at least be reassured that running red hat's distros doesn't put you in immediate moral peril and probably doesn't increase your personal exposure to surveillance.
So I guess what I would say is don't feel pressure to rush into a change. Take your time and hopefully you'll find something nicer than Fedora that you like.
Low key though and I hope nobody on hexbear dot net sees me tell you this. Running Fedora on your computer at home doesn't really provide any support to red hat the company and its government and military shit. It is also unlikely that they are overtly backdooring their distro specifically (its more likely/true to say that they have helped backdoor almost all distros via systemd.)
Of course not, the backdoor is on NSA developed SELinux /s
I didn't post this to tell people to switch from Fedora, just that it's monstrous behavior by the parent company. Of course they use Fedora as their downstream beta testing of features but that's a different conversation.
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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