I’ve happily been a Fedora user for many years now, but RHEL’s recent choice to put their source code behind a paywall has me pondering ethical considerations of my distro choice.

It’s my understanding that this doesn’t have a direct impact on Fedora, and I feel confident that it will continue to be a great distro for the foreseeable future, but I want the commercial/enterprise/corporate influence on the distro I run to be as minimal as possible. For it to be as free as possible.

With that in mind, what distros would everyone recommend?

I only have recent-ish experience with Fedora, Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu. I don’t really know much about any others.

Ideally, I’d like it to fit within these boxes as well:

  • Reasonable release cycle time. Debian as an example tends to be too stale by it’s nature. Edit for clarification: doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, just don’t want to fight with outdated dependencies if I’m compiling something from source. I feel distros generally ride this line well, but I’ve run into a handful of times in the past with Debian.
  • Doesn’t try too hard to be user friendly. Obsfucating system internals, forcing a specific DE on you, that kind of thing.
  • Not overly time consuming to maintain. Arch would be an example of that in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, Arch is awesome. But maintaining a rolling release and a bunch of AUR’s gets tiresome.
  • Doesn’t try to force you to use a flatpaks, snaps, etc.

Seeing it all written out, that’s pretty picky. And maybe this unicorn distro doesn’t exist. But on the other hand, maybe it does.

A final thought. I know Debian has a testing branch. Anyone have any experience using that as a daily driver? Is it viable?

  • Brownian Motion
    link
    81 year ago

    Your second, third and fourth points eliminate many distros such as Ubuntu. And many of the distros out there are based on Debian.

    Debian isn’t really stale. It is currently running kernel 6.1.10 which is not a long way from 6.1.39 (longterm, and that only came out 2 days ago). Stable gets constant updates. Testing is also generally very stable. The only thing that stops testing moving into stable is what are considered Release Critical bug count. All documented here: https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ftparchives#testing

    Also while Debian 12 is LTS, it won’t stop 13 from coming out and it doesn’t stop you from upgrading to 13 (although you may lose LTS if they decide that 13 will not be LTS).

    Debian is about as open as you can get, certainly does not infringe on your 2, 3 and 4th points.

    Only other thing is what you are doing with your Linux, this might make a difference (you say daily driver, but doing what? Just office stuff, or heavy video editing, etc)