Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.
I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?
There’s oculus software for my vr but don’t know what I’m going to do with that
Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly
Update two: that’s a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info
“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition… this applies to both open or closed software. Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer. IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Open software is great and a reassurance that no altering can go unnoticed but let’s be realistic, when is the last time some entity, let alone non-American) audited a entire package of Fedora, let alone every single version of it, or smaller software. Debian is a US based but highly global collaborative distro so malice is far harder to introduce and gone unnoticed. Mint is based on Ireland so hardly with an militaristic goal, either by maintainers, financiers or country. My current OpenSUSE is far more susceptible to tampering than Mint, but it still cannot reach the knees of Fedora on susceptibility. We should look at Android and Chrome… It is free, opensource, but the fact that Google de-facto controls it, uses it to dominate the landscape, first by suffocating competition and then, to steer where it wants the technology to go to. Therefore that it is opensource is great, we can check the code once in a while,
I am one of the very few that recognize Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu deviates yet I think we should steer clear from it. To newcomers, I tell them the reality; in my opinion Fedora is the marginally the best linux distro, now, if ethics (and a little bit privacy) is one of the motives to move away from Windows, you should consider distros not so heavily relying on the US and Mint usually comes first in my mind for them. We don’t want to get to the point that Fedora is so vastly superior to all the rest of Linux distros, that will be the only game in town… like we did by solely go after Android (I really miss what my Nokia N9’s Meego could have become!)
well said, but i wonder how much it will matter in the future considering that the kernel group itself has so willingly kowtowed to american hegemony in its recent expulsion of russian developers from the kernel maintainers group to align itself with american export controls.
So true eldavi! The “Russian kernel maintainers” event was a big red flag for me. I know Linux had no choice to expel them due to the law, but the fact that Linus Torvalds did not thank them for the job done (if he kept them till then , Torvalds clearly has see their contributions as beneficial), and Torvalds did not try to reassure the audience that hardly any code is posted unsupervised in a open source… that was the main scandal for me, far more than the ban. I had known that Torvalds was a rude person, many maintainers are and I am ok with that, but that event showed me that not only easily folds to government requests, but that also he believes it is ok to do these things against people you don’t like…
In his own words; “please use whatever mush you call brains. I’m Finnish”. I don’t think he referred to the Finland that thrived the most in its history during the period of maintaining a strong military culture yet NEUTRAL (1948-2023) and away from NATO, but he deeply meant the Finland that sided with Germany in the early 40s in order to stick-it to Moscow. Would he stop at firing developers or would be willing to do more for the cause? I bet many wonder.
This would make sense if redhat had partnerships with hardware vendors and was locking down systems. They’ve never done that and there’s no evidence of a plan to. Furthermore, suffocating the competition when the competition is closed source platforms like what google is doing and microsoft is a good thing. Competition isn’t inherently good, competition is good when it does good things. In the case of completely FOSS from the ground up software, there’s no benefit to competition, it just means duplication of massive amounts of effort. If fedora started doing something shitty, there is no doubt that it would INSTANTLY be forked by hundreds of users to remove that, there’s no way for redhat to create a vendor-lockin situation the same can’t be said for windows or chromeos (yes you can technically fork chromeos but they have the software vendor locked on the hardware).
Redhat simply doesn’t have that level of control and can’t ever, unless they completely change their business model, which would also instantly make them worthless.
In other words, there’s no such thing as a redhat user, fedora is just a linux distro without any way of locking the user in to their particular distro. I’d be more worried about ubuntu trying this with snap. I challenge you going down this line of thinking to actually create a scenario where this is a problem that makes strategic sense on their part.
It could, but it doesn’t when the software isn’t vendor locked and is fully open source.
Again, as a user, how does this matter? Do you not think the military should run FOSS software? If you’re anti-military it’s not like proprietary software won’t work there. I’d rather have the military running foss software than proprietary software personally. Somebody was going to do it anyway, what does it matter?
Yes, the US is evil, but I don’t see what that has to do with their military running libre software.
I feel that I am being misinterpreted here. Of course FOSS if infinitely preferable to most close source, even if FOSS was created by the devil itself! And I am neutral US army branches using FOSS or not, that is not a problem for us civilians per se; the US army just using FOSS when they have unlimited budget and have home-brewed closed sources available and still choose Linux just proves that FOSS is superior! Now, that Red Hat depends heavily on US government contracts (mostly US armed forces) should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics (again, I say ethics and a little bit privacy concerns), not technological, at least no in the short term. However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily). Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them… now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero. That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources. It is just a principle, of course, I tell my audience that they can use Fedora and I understand it, it is technologically a bit better than Mint, yet not quite not as an ethical choice, nor good for the technology ecosystem in the long run either. Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master. This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
I agree that it’s a red flag… but in this case, I don’t think that red flag really amounts to something, just because something is a bad sign doesn’t mean it actually matters on proper analysis.
It will always be incredibly easy to fork because they have to follow the GPL.
Forking android is extremely easy, the part of android that they’re unable to fork is the google play store… which is proprietary. Redhat has no equivalent and if they ever made one, they’d instantly be abandoned because the whole point of their business model is being FOSS.
Literally anyone in their basement can do it, tbh, i don’t know why you think this is difficult, android is a terrible example for this since it is mostly proprietary, sure the OS itself isn’t, but google play services are the hard part, again.
No, that’s why we should favor the GPL to the MIT license, and FOSS to proprietary software.
Except in this case their advantage is their free open source nature, which is literally the only reason the government has contracts with them.
we’re purely better off for it. librewolf exists, servo is picking up funding if you don’t like librewolf for some reason. The only reason firefox exists as a competitor is because of this antitrust situation, if we didn’t use firefox because we were concerned about this, we’d have literally nothing. It’s also a counter-example to this idea you have that forking is difficult… librewolf happened and it was easy.
I’m openly anti-military and anti-US, but I don’t think you’ve thought these arguments fully through.
I am still no able to get my message through.
Of course, it is easy to fork, is that when you depend solely on a entity that it is prone to abandon you, you wont have the resources to continue the development. US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left. This is not far fetched, this is what happens with Android and Firefox. If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
I am afraid we are taking different things here… I look in a long perspective view, you in a inmediate future, where, as you said, no big changes if a dominant FOSS project goes hostile. The lack of expertise, culture makes it really hard in fact. Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
this isn’t even possible even if fedora got 99.9999% market share, most linux distros are passion projects, even the ones that aren’t don’t need much funding. Debian will never go away, arch will never go away, so that simply can’t happen unless they’re militaristically destroyed. You say this is not far fetched, but i’m afraid I completely disagree, that doesn’t even sound remotely possible. Fedora doesn’t even do that much, they just package together a bunch of other things that are developed completely independently of them (they don’t even make their own kernel, that’s like 90% of the work!)
fedora cannot legally become closed source, most of it is GPL licensed. Lookup “copyleft”, this is why android isn’t already proprietary.
This isn’t true, there are many open source android projects could easily keep things going. The only reason huawei does all that is because of the proprietary parts, this doesn’t exist as a problem in linux, and cannot be created as one. Firefox would still be developed without mozilla, just significantly slower. Lookup phones with microg, they have no such issues keeping things going. Browsers are a special case that require a ton of resources to keep secure, OS’s, not so much.
Also, google cannot legally close source android, that’s the point of the GPL.
Even then what you’re saying is “these aren’t viable open source projects without a lot of funding” and android absolutely is, firefox MIGHT be.
none of these concerns resemble this situation.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…
Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
Like i’ve said repeatedly, it’s the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, it’s not a big deal.
here’s an example: https://xdaforums.com/c/bliss-roms.7296/
If they cannot do the work that single devs can do, then they aren’t even trying.
Single inexperienced developers do this with regularity for fun.
There’s no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedora’s whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all they’d have is DNF… Also, if this happened, redhat having marketshare would be the least of our worries. It really wouldn’t even matter.
here’s a full list of their projects: https://next.redhat.com/projects-full/
do you even use any of those?
Hell, they hardly even have DNF since they’re trying to switch to flatpak, soon they won’t even be in control of most of packaging, just the default suite of apps. This is an incredibly bad move if they’re ever going to do what you’re claiming, it’s essentially irreversible.
None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, it’s the distribution of that software that’s valuable, they package it well, but they don’t make it themselves… KDE will not go with redhat, they’re separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils aren’t made by them.
You seem to be under the impression that fedora is entirely made by redhat, this is completely false, it’s just a bunch of things other people make they’ve bundled together. Redhat does not and cannot have much power over this unless they start building massive amounts of infrastructure from scratch, which they won’t be able to justify to investors because it will, again, be entirely against their business model.
The moment fedora becomes proprietary, people will fork, switch, and never think about them again. Even if they do become proprietary through some magic, we’ll still have all the previous versions to work with, they’ll have to offer some features to make switching to the proprietary version worthwhile, and given what KDE already offers, i can’t even imagine what that would be.
They honestly probably don’t even need to fork… dnf isn’t even that good of a package manager.