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It might be Debian's slow release cycle. The people who comment & review love new things, because they can comment on them and review. But that creates a massiv

by roenxi 3y ago

It might be Debian's slow release cycle. The people who comment & review love new things, because they can comment on them and review. But that creates a massive bias against the silent majority who dislike upgrades and don't want to think about the OS. Compare Debian to Fedora. Fedora there are multiple releases per year. Debian you have the protection of being in the herd for a good 2 years. Each release is a much more known quality and it is easier to find bugs and documentation for whatever it is that got broken in Bookworm. Investing in workarounds makes more sense because it won't be fixed in 6 months. Etc. Only software project I know where it seems likely that moving slow is a positive. But slow seems to work well for Debian. As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. EDIT Also, woah! Anticipating something like this sort of manoeuvre is a good reason to have avoided RHEL. Corporations. Not long term bastions of freedom. "However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public. The code is still available to Red Hat customers, as well as developers using free accounts, though under conditions that forbid redistribution of the source code." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux

jacquesm 3y ago
Amen. An OS should get out of the way of the real work as much as possible. Any time spent on the OS itself by and end user is essentially time wasted that can never be recovered by writing or using a better application. An OS is essentially a delivery mechanism, not a goal in its own right.
BossingAround 3y ago
> As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. As a Fedora user, I like that someone pays for Fedora development, which (hopefully?) enforces standards in terms of code quality and QA, but also things like workplace policies etc. (e.g. I couldn't use software whose staff has been alleging sexual assault). I think the only non-corporate distro I'd use is Arch (which I did for a while, but Fedora is just so easy to use!) I should give Debian a try though for sure.
dralley 3y ago
> "However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public" That's not actually true, it's just not being provided in such a way as to be trivially rebuildable. CentOS Stream is the upstream for RHEL and as such you can reconstruct RHEL from CentOS Stream [1], it just requires more effort to track the correct package versions. [1] yes, I'm aware that has broken on occasion, almost exclusively for EL8 where the upstream / downstream process wasn't fully developed yet

by roenxi 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

Amen. An OS should get out of the way of the real work as much as possible. Any time spent on the OS itself by and end user is essentially time wasted that can never be recovered by writing or using a better application. An OS is essentially a delivery mechanism, not a goal in its own right.

BossingAround 3y ago

> As for Red Hat, it seems a bit dodgy to get involved with a company as an unpaid user. The incentives are never going to line up. Love their work, I just wouldn't use their system if I wasn't paying them. As a Fedora user, I like that someone pays for Fedora development, which (hopefully?) enforces standards in terms of code quality and QA, but also things like workplace policies etc. (e.g. I couldn't use software whose staff has been alleging sexual assault). I think the only non-corporate distro I'd use is Arch (which I did for a while, but Fedora is just so easy to use!) I should give Debian a try though for sure.

dralley 3y ago

> "However, in 2023, Red Hat decided to stop making the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux available to the public" That's not actually true, it's just not being provided in such a way as to be trivially rebuildable. CentOS Stream is the upstream for RHEL and as such you can reconstruct RHEL from CentOS Stream [1], it just requires more effort to track the correct package versions. [1] yes, I'm aware that has broken on occasion, almost exclusively for EL8 where the upstream / downstream process wasn't fully developed yet