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Ubuntu used to be what Fedora is now - a common-sense desktop distro for regular people. At some point though it completely jumped the shark and started inventi

Ubuntu used to be what Fedora is now - a common-sense desktop distro for regular people. At some point though it completely jumped the shark and started inventing things nobody wanted (typical of corporate-controlled software).

gjsman-1000 2y ago
> typical of corporate-controlled software If I had a nickel for every time the Linux community reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for, but refused to implement a feature everyone asked for...
- alexvitkov 2y ago
  A scary amount of critical FOSS projects are just some guy's hobby, and a hobbyist will often work on problems they find interesting, regardless of whether or not they're important for the "community". If you're coming home from work and have one hour of free time, do you really want to spend it investigating why a Meta+Shift+F11 doesn't work in your program under Wayland on Womperloo Linux 11.4? That's the #1 reason why people need to be paid to work on important software. In a corporate environment (with somewhat reasonable management) boring but important work will land in someone's Jira ticket and they'll be paid to get it done.
  - wavemode 2y ago
    OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. Corporate environments incentivize working on flashy, highly visible work. Bugfixing edge cases is the opposite of that, and usually falls by the wayside (unless it's the kind of company where quality is a metric that is enforced, which is rare). The flipside of open source maintainers being unpaid (or, at least, their pay not being linked to their output) is that they have time to care deeply about quality, and many really do. Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
    - alexvitkov 2y ago
      > OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. That's true, but Meta+Shift+F11 will usually be fixed if it breaks on Windows, and ironically will very likely work Womperloo 11.4 as well, because Wine basically runs all Windows software that doesn't make it an explicit goal not to run under Wine perfectly. > Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that. Linux is a great example - it's the most arguably the most successful FOSS project, and that's no small part due to the fact that Linus, as well as a ton of other programmers get paid a lot of money to work on it.
      - wavemode 2y ago
        I would argue that he cared deeply about quality long before he was ever making money from Linux. But we're splitting hairs over a tangential argument at this point.
      - bombcar 2y ago
        https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ makes a good point that the really only stable ABI on Linux is WIN32, especially if you step an inch off the "we have the source and build from it every time" train. Linus keeps the kernel ABI as stable as he can, but that's only a small part of Linux.
- porridgeraisin 2y ago
  True. Wayland is the primary example.
- zeroc8 2y ago
  But you would be even richer if you had a nickel for every time Microsoft reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for...
germandiago 2y ago
But I think package management with yum was quite inferior. That used to be a problem at least before, for me.
- snickell 2y ago
  Fedora 22 (released 2015) switched default package managers from yum to dnf. dnf is faster, and better at resolving complex dependency chains. Additionally, its better at rollbacks on the rare occasions these are required. apt-get might still be a hair faster, but they're pretty comparable at this point.
- jonkoops 2y ago
  These days are long gone. Fedora switched to DNF, recently they moved to DNF5 which was re-written to C++ and is blazing fast.
  - dralley 2y ago
    C++ isn't the reason it's blazing fast, moreso that they took the rewrite opportunity to improve the parallelism and be more clever about which metadata actually needs to be downloaded instead of downloading all of it, every time.
    - germandiago 2y ago
      Do not touch my baby C++ is pretty fast :) Jokes apart, I guess that not all is procedsing yhere is also IO and other stuff going on here so I would not expect C++ to be critical here for most of the workload.
- mldbk 2y ago
  It was a fair point decade ago, today Fedora's pkg mgmt is miles ahead of what it used to be.
sofixa 2y ago
> things nobody wanted (typical of corporate-controlled software). I mean, can't you say the same thing of Fedora? Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way. Canonical tried the same, to much less success, with LXD, Upstart, Unity. But it's literally the same playbook. Well, at least all of these efforts were and are open source.
- bonzini 2y ago
  Of the three you mention, the only one where you might have a point is Podman (and even then it's not entirely black and white, for example Podman's most appealing feature is not having a daemon). Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros. And while Wayland was started by a Red Hat employee on his own time, most of the development was done by Intel if I remember correctly. It seems to me that you confuse "Red Hat is really good at building communities where everyone can contribute what they'd like" with "Red Hat forces what Red Hat wants onto everyone else". And yes, it helps that everything's open source and without a CLA.
  - sofixa 2y ago
    > Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros. It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen. That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?

gjsman-1000 2y ago

> typical of corporate-controlled software If I had a nickel for every time the Linux community reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for, but refused to implement a feature everyone asked for...

alexvitkov 2y ago
A scary amount of critical FOSS projects are just some guy's hobby, and a hobbyist will often work on problems they find interesting, regardless of whether or not they're important for the "community". If you're coming home from work and have one hour of free time, do you really want to spend it investigating why a Meta+Shift+F11 doesn't work in your program under Wayland on Womperloo Linux 11.4? That's the #1 reason why people need to be paid to work on important software. In a corporate environment (with somewhat reasonable management) boring but important work will land in someone's Jira ticket and they'll be paid to get it done.
- wavemode 2y ago
  OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. Corporate environments incentivize working on flashy, highly visible work. Bugfixing edge cases is the opposite of that, and usually falls by the wayside (unless it's the kind of company where quality is a metric that is enforced, which is rare). The flipside of open source maintainers being unpaid (or, at least, their pay not being linked to their output) is that they have time to care deeply about quality, and many really do. Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that.
  - alexvitkov 2y ago
    > OH, trust me - corporate environments are not at all conducive to making sure bugs get fixed for Womperloo 11.4 users. That's true, but Meta+Shift+F11 will usually be fixed if it breaks on Windows, and ironically will very likely work Womperloo 11.4 as well, because Wine basically runs all Windows software that doesn't make it an explicit goal not to run under Wine perfectly. > Linus Torvalds is not going to sit idly by while an update is shipped out that breaks Womperloo, I'll tell you that. Linux is a great example - it's the most arguably the most successful FOSS project, and that's no small part due to the fact that Linus, as well as a ton of other programmers get paid a lot of money to work on it.
    - wavemode 2y ago
      I would argue that he cared deeply about quality long before he was ever making money from Linux. But we're splitting hairs over a tangential argument at this point.
    - bombcar 2y ago
      https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/ makes a good point that the really only stable ABI on Linux is WIN32, especially if you step an inch off the "we have the source and build from it every time" train. Linus keeps the kernel ABI as stable as he can, but that's only a small part of Linux.
porridgeraisin 2y ago
True. Wayland is the primary example.
zeroc8 2y ago
But you would be even richer if you had a nickel for every time Microsoft reinvented the wheel for things nobody asked for...

germandiago 2y ago

But I think package management with yum was quite inferior. That used to be a problem at least before, for me.

snickell 2y ago
Fedora 22 (released 2015) switched default package managers from yum to dnf. dnf is faster, and better at resolving complex dependency chains. Additionally, its better at rollbacks on the rare occasions these are required. apt-get might still be a hair faster, but they're pretty comparable at this point.
jonkoops 2y ago
These days are long gone. Fedora switched to DNF, recently they moved to DNF5 which was re-written to C++ and is blazing fast.
- dralley 2y ago
  C++ isn't the reason it's blazing fast, moreso that they took the rewrite opportunity to improve the parallelism and be more clever about which metadata actually needs to be downloaded instead of downloading all of it, every time.
  - germandiago 2y ago
    Do not touch my baby C++ is pretty fast :) Jokes apart, I guess that not all is procedsing yhere is also IO and other stuff going on here so I would not expect C++ to be critical here for most of the workload.
mldbk 2y ago
It was a fair point decade ago, today Fedora's pkg mgmt is miles ahead of what it used to be.

sofixa 2y ago

> things nobody wanted (typical of corporate-controlled software). I mean, can't you say the same thing of Fedora? Podman, Systemd, Wayland and tons of other software was created by or sponsored by Red Hat because everything has to be done their way. Canonical tried the same, to much less success, with LXD, Upstart, Unity. But it's literally the same playbook. Well, at least all of these efforts were and are open source.

bonzini 2y ago
Of the three you mention, the only one where you might have a point is Podman (and even then it's not entirely black and white, for example Podman's most appealing feature is not having a daemon). Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros. And while Wayland was started by a Red Hat employee on his own time, most of the development was done by Intel if I remember correctly. It seems to me that you confuse "Red Hat is really good at building communities where everyone can contribute what they'd like" with "Red Hat forces what Red Hat wants onto everyone else". And yes, it helps that everything's open source and without a CLA.
- sofixa 2y ago
  > Systemd was the second attempt at a new init system. The writing had been on the wall for a while for sysvinit, it just turned out that upstart wasn't really fixable. Later, when systemd started trying to unify more aspects of the distro, a lot of the conventions that were adopted didn't even come from Red Hats distros. It was still mostly driven by Red Hat people, most notably a guy who was terrible at taking feedback, and proposed "solutions" for security vulnerabilities which were bullshit ("just update systemd", as if you can just do that on any distro). For years systemd had pretty terrible downsides (you know how it deals with conflicting dependencies? randomness! Because that's what you need for an init system, random ordering), yet RH and the person in charge refused to listen. That all the software RH made/sponsored had some advantage or another over alternatives doesn't change my initial point - Fedora, and RHEL, are full of RH alternatives to existing software. Yeah, Podman is better than Docker in some ways, but RH still removed user's choice by forcing their half baked "drop in replacement" that for multiple years couldn't do half of what the predecessor did. Nowadays Podman is decent, but it has been the forced default for how long now?