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I've used Red Hat Linux (first Caldera Linux, a 90s era clone), then Fedora, as well as RHEL and its clones (Scientific, Centos, Rocky) since the late 90s. I've

by emidln 3y ago

I've used Red Hat Linux (first Caldera Linux, a 90s era clone), then Fedora, as well as RHEL and its clones (Scientific, Centos, Rocky) since the late 90s. I've used it personally, pedagogically, and professionally. I recommendeded it to others for their desktops and servers. If you wanted to use Linux, I'd tell you there are two options that are stable and well-supported: Red Hat and Debian. Red Hat has died recently. RIP. I'm no longer confident that Fedora will continue to be a thriving open-source project. If IBM is killing RHEL clones now, why risk Fedora being next? I hear you saying "RHEL is derived from Fedora" and "Fedora is a separate open-source project". The thing is, RHEL is derived from Centos Stream *now*. Why does Fedora need to exist? Or rather, why does Red Hat need to provide engineering and infra to Fedora? It's true that Fedora is a separate project, but its mostly contributed by Red Hat employees. If IBM decides tomorrow to stop paying for Fedora because Centos Stream is enough, can Fedora stand alone? Maybe this is just FUD, but I no longer have confidence in an IBM owned Linux distro. I've already moved to Debian for personal machines, and I've been advocating it professionally as well. It's just irresponsible for an org that spends significant engineering time customizing their Linux installations to base on an uncertain Red Hat/IBM backed distro over a fully open-source project with no strings attached. Fool me once shame on you but fool me twice and, well, IBM isn't going to get me again.

INTPenis 3y ago
>RHEL is derived from Centos Stream now. Why does Fedora need to exist? But with your extensive history in he Red Hat sphere you should know that each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release. Fedora will still act as the testing ground for all things CentOS, and therefore all things RHEL. What are the arguments against this model of development where they have a "future distro" like Fedora to model their future RHEL releases after?
- emidln 3y ago
  > each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release This is the current state. Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora ("rawhide"), then cut a Fedora release, then bless a Fedora release as Centos Stream, then backport from rawhide to Centos Stream as needed until they decide to cut a RHEL branch? If I were an exec at IBM, that would seem like a lot of extra releng salary that could be better spent directly on core product (which is RHEL which comes from Centos Stream) or billable hours. Someone's bonus can go up a few bills by eliminating a line item while improving efficiency. Why should IBM continue paying for rawhide -> fedora release -> centos stream -> rhel ? How long until the fedora release step is put out to pasture then eventually culled?
  - dralley 3y ago
    You're basically suggesting that to do a complete step change every 3 years might be considered "more efficient" but literally nobody would consider that more efficient, it would just add massively more risk into the whole process and be recouped later by delays. That is agile v. waterfall 101, and even IBM is perfectly capable of understanding that. That is to say nothing of the fact that Fedora is used very extensively internally, and that there are hardware partners like Lenovo that sell it preinstalled, and Fedora Asahi which is the new home of Apple hardware enablement (and thus the best Aarch64 development platform). The Fedora ecosystem is extremely valuable to Red Hat.
  - gertrunde 3y ago
    Because that work still has to occur somewhere? And they can do that work internally, privately, in the dark, where they cannot benefit from any community engagement, or they can do that work in the open, engaging with the community. I suspect the difference in cost between the two is not significant enough to be relevant, and the open variant has more benefits. Note that this was RH's stated intent when the whole CentOS non-Stream EoL shenanigans went down - they said that Fedora & CentOS Stream benefits RHEL, CentOS non-Stream does not. [After writing this, I was curious about Fedora project costs, they are lower than I thought: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html - Red Hat's contribution was ~$196k for FY2020 (in cash, there's probably more 'soft' costs in terms of staff and hardware time/resources)).
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    They're getting free community testing of early software in Fedora. I don't think you realize just how much RH focuses on releasing stable software. They have SLAs with government agencies, healthcare providers and they need to live up to them. This is why CentOS Stream is in fact more secure than RHEL because they spend so much time testing the patches that go into RHEL that CentOS Stream now gets them before RHEL. A reversal to the state of affairs with old CentOS. It is also why they were so keen on killing any project that claims to be a RHEL clone, because they want their customers to know what they're downloading, and know what they're running. RHEL comes with guarantees. Of course I'm the first to admit that most of their motivations to kill the CentOS source repo were financial. That doesn't change the fact that Red Hat is a very enterprise-minded company, and their perspective isn't always obvious to the rest of us.
alisonatwork 3y ago
Fedora is used for the WSL 2 VM that enables Podman on Windows. I think it'll stick around at least in this format for a while.
npteljes 3y ago
I share this sentiment, even though I joined the Linux club much later, and began the journey with Ubuntu. I have arrived on Debian for similar reasons though. It just seems the purest distro while also being very popular and well supported.
Spooky23 3y ago
> Maybe this is just FUD It is.

by emidln 3y ago

INTPenis 3y ago

>RHEL is derived from Centos Stream now. Why does Fedora need to exist? But with your extensive history in he Red Hat sphere you should know that each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release. Fedora will still act as the testing ground for all things CentOS, and therefore all things RHEL. What are the arguments against this model of development where they have a "future distro" like Fedora to model their future RHEL releases after?

emidln 3y ago
> each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release This is the current state. Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora ("rawhide"), then cut a Fedora release, then bless a Fedora release as Centos Stream, then backport from rawhide to Centos Stream as needed until they decide to cut a RHEL branch? If I were an exec at IBM, that would seem like a lot of extra releng salary that could be better spent directly on core product (which is RHEL which comes from Centos Stream) or billable hours. Someone's bonus can go up a few bills by eliminating a line item while improving efficiency. Why should IBM continue paying for rawhide -> fedora release -> centos stream -> rhel ? How long until the fedora release step is put out to pasture then eventually culled?
- dralley 3y ago
  You're basically suggesting that to do a complete step change every 3 years might be considered "more efficient" but literally nobody would consider that more efficient, it would just add massively more risk into the whole process and be recouped later by delays. That is agile v. waterfall 101, and even IBM is perfectly capable of understanding that. That is to say nothing of the fact that Fedora is used very extensively internally, and that there are hardware partners like Lenovo that sell it preinstalled, and Fedora Asahi which is the new home of Apple hardware enablement (and thus the best Aarch64 development platform). The Fedora ecosystem is extremely valuable to Red Hat.
- gertrunde 3y ago
  Because that work still has to occur somewhere? And they can do that work internally, privately, in the dark, where they cannot benefit from any community engagement, or they can do that work in the open, engaging with the community. I suspect the difference in cost between the two is not significant enough to be relevant, and the open variant has more benefits. Note that this was RH's stated intent when the whole CentOS non-Stream EoL shenanigans went down - they said that Fedora & CentOS Stream benefits RHEL, CentOS non-Stream does not. [After writing this, I was curious about Fedora project costs, they are lower than I thought: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html - Red Hat's contribution was ~$196k for FY2020 (in cash, there's probably more 'soft' costs in terms of staff and hardware time/resources)).
- INTPenis 3y ago
  They're getting free community testing of early software in Fedora. I don't think you realize just how much RH focuses on releasing stable software. They have SLAs with government agencies, healthcare providers and they need to live up to them. This is why CentOS Stream is in fact more secure than RHEL because they spend so much time testing the patches that go into RHEL that CentOS Stream now gets them before RHEL. A reversal to the state of affairs with old CentOS. It is also why they were so keen on killing any project that claims to be a RHEL clone, because they want their customers to know what they're downloading, and know what they're running. RHEL comes with guarantees. Of course I'm the first to admit that most of their motivations to kill the CentOS source repo were financial. That doesn't change the fact that Red Hat is a very enterprise-minded company, and their perspective isn't always obvious to the rest of us.

alisonatwork 3y ago

Fedora is used for the WSL 2 VM that enables Podman on Windows. I think it'll stick around at least in this format for a while.

npteljes 3y ago

I share this sentiment, even though I joined the Linux club much later, and began the journey with Ubuntu. I have arrived on Debian for similar reasons though. It just seems the purest distro while also being very popular and well supported.

Spooky23 3y ago

> Maybe this is just FUD It is.