Um. No.

Red Hat is not a publicly traded company and has not been for 5 years. They are a division of IBM. What you can know about Red Hat financials comes from IBM’s financial statements.

Red Hat has three primary product lines of which RHEL is one.

Did you read the article?

Being cynical about Red Hat is fine as long as we keep it factual. I enjoy their contributions but otherwise have no skin in their game.

I am not as enthusiastic about Rocky. I cannot see at all how you can compare them to Debian. It seems unfair even to Alma to lump them in with Rocky as Alma is taking the high road. Best of luck with Rocky though. Truly.

Your make a good case that “community” means “cannot be shut down by a corporation”. Thank you for that. Can a “bug-for-bug RHEL clone” be community though? If Red Hat cancels RHEL ( unlikely ), is there still a Rocky Linux?

IBM has to file public financials. Tracking rough Red Hat revenues is not all that hard. They have done very well.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/red-hat-high-growth-streak-151126295.html

I won’t get back into the Fedora thing. I bet the whole dollar though that, if RHEL disappeared, Rocky and Oracle would take no interest in Fedora.

Full disclosure - I do not use any of these enterprise distros anymore although the stance taken by Alma makes them attractive to me. I am looking for ways to use them.

If we had more time and maybe more beer, I would be interested to get into a discussion about what “community” is.

CentOS pre-Stream was not a “community” distro in my view as I do not see “downloads that cost no money” as the backbone of what makes a community.

CentOS ( pre-Stream ) could not innovate their own distro. They could not even fix a bug without breaking their “bug-for-bug” RHEL compatibility promise. All they did was recompile and redistribute RHEL packages with the trademarks removed. What kind of community do you have if you do not produce anything? Everything from CentOS was actually provided by Red Hat. It was just literally “RHEL without paying”. There was no diversity.

CemtOS Stream is managed by Red Hat for sure as its primary purpose is to become the base for a future version of RHEL. However, it is Open Source and developed fully out in the open. Contributions are possible.

Unlike CentOS of old, the “community” can contribute to and debate the future of CentOS Stream. Alma has contributed bug fixes for example. It has been a bit painful as Red Hat is used to being the only one in the sandbox but the process is evolving. CentOS Stream has multiple contributors ( not just Red Hat ). This means that others have some influence on what RHEL looks like in the future. “The community” can build on that.

In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was. You do not have to agree of course. Anyway, I hope other projects join with Alma and Red Hat in contributing to CentOS Stream.

For all their flag waving about “the community”, distros like Rocky and Oracle have shown no interest in contributing to CentOS Stream. They continue to clone the distro that Red Hat forks from CentOS Stream. They don’t get involved until all the work has been done. Then they make money off it ( the only reason they are there ).

Largely true but Red Hat also wanted to control their own cloud / container stack.

Cloud is a big part of why IBM paid so many billions for Red Hat to begin with.

Things should get a lot better with NVIDIA soon in distros like Fedora that want to stick with only open software.

Not the original commenter but Red Hat took steps a few months ago to make it harder to make complete bug-for-bug clones of their Enterprise product ( RHEL ). Basically, they stopped providing the exact build instructions and exact patch sets ( SRPMS ) to their competitors. You now have to jump through more hoops to do it ( like Rocky does ) or you have to fork your own Enterprise distribution from CentOS Stream ( like Alma now does ).

You still get everything you always did as a Red Hat subscriber ( even if you do not pay them — they have a free tier ). All the actual software is still Open Source for everybody ( subscriber or not ) and available free in CentOS Stream and Fedora. Red Hat is still one of the biggest contributors across the Linux ecosystem and, ironically, one of the biggest proponents and providers of GPL software in particular.

However, if you are a Red Hat subscriber and you share the RHEL SRPMS, Red Hat may not renew your subscription. That is their big evil move.

Many people did not like this change and the most extreme detractors have accused Red Hat of betraying Open Source or of even trying to take Linux proprietary. In my view, this is totally wrong. Read my second paragraph.

What many people do not seem to understand is that Red Hat founded the Fedora Project and, much later, the CentOS Stream Project explicitly to be open, community distributions so that they ( Red Hat ) could pursue their commercial interests with RHEL without friction from the community. I say people do not understand because some people now say they do not trust Fedora to stay Open when the entire reason it exists is to be that ( as an explicit strategy of Red Hat ).

One of the things that is annoying ( to me ) about Fedora is that it insists on being completely anti-commercial ( avoiding patented codecs for example ). The idea that Fedora is for businesses or will be “taken over” by IBM is silly. Red Hat employees have always been the biggest contributors to Fedora. It has always been Free ( as in freedom ).

The most extreme damage Red Hat may eventually do to Fedora is to stop paying so many people to work on it and the important packages it relies on. That has not happened and probably will not anytime soon ( in my view ).

We agree.

My point is that “porting” is not such a big deal if it is just recompile. If you already target Linux with a portable code base ( to support both ARM and amd64 for example ) then the burden of RISC-V is pretty low. Most of the support will be the same between RISC-V and ARM if they target the same Linux distros.

The Linux distros themselves are just a recompile as well and so the entire Open Source ecosystem will be available to RISC-V right away.

It is a very different world from x86 vs Itanium with amd64 added to the mix.

Look at Apple Silicon. Fedora already has a full distribution targeting Apple Silicon Macs. The biggest challenges have been drivers, not the ISA. The more complete the Linux ecosystem is on ARM, the easier it will be to create distros for RISC-V as well.

Porting Windows games to Linux is not a small step. It is massive and introduces a huge support burden. That is much different than just recompiling your already portable and already Linux hosted applications to a new arch.

With games, I actually hope the Win32 API becomes the standard on Linux as well because it is more stable and reduces the support burden on game studios. It may even be ok if they stay x86-64. Games leverage the GPU more than the CPU and so are not as greatly impacted running the CPU under emulation.

That is a risk on the Windows side for sure. Also, once an ISA becomes popular ( like Apple Silicon ) it will be hard to displace.

Repurposing Linux software for RISC-V should be easy though and I would expect even proprietary software that targets Linux to support it ( if the support anything beyond x86-64 ).

Itanium was a weird architecture and you either bet on it or you did not. RISC and ARM are not so different.

The other factor is that there is a lot less assembly language being used and, if you port away from x64, you are probably going to get rid of any that remains as part of that ( making the app more portable ).

If you were using Red Hat before Fedora, that makes sense. The Red Hat of old split into two: Fedora and RHEL.

Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community and non-commercial distribution. Then Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) to be an explicitly enterprises focused and commercial distribution.

In recent years, CentOS Stream has been added which is still enterprise focussed but meant to the “community” precursor to RHEL. If anything, the need for CentOS should re-enforce that non-enterprise nature of Fedora.

I see no reason to downvote you at all.

The distros that everybody builds off of are Debian, Fedora,Arch, and maybe SUSE ( common roots with Fedora but long ago ).

I did not mention Ubuntu as Ubuntu is actually built from Debian but actually Ubuntu is the most popular and is itself used as a base by other distros ( most notably Mint ).

If you are looking for an Ubuntu alternative, Debian is the most similar. However, pure Debian is not as new user friendly.

Arch is considered an advanced distro. I think Fedora and its derivatives are solid choices.

If you are really running on a system with only 4 GB of RAM, I would actually recommend trying out a 32 bit distro. The 32 bit version of AntiX or the 32 bit version of Q4OS with the Trinity desktop are the two I would recommend.

I was recently reminded of Adelie Linux though and have been meaning to try it on an old system myself: https://www.adelielinux.org/about/

I think Fedora is solid choice. I will tell you why I do not recommend it to new users myself.

1 - Fedora is very focused on being non-commercial ( see my other comments on its history ). This leads them to avoid useful software like codecs that I think new users will expect out of the box

2a- the support cycle is fairly short and whole release upgrades are required

2b - Fedora is typically an early adopter of new tech. It is not “bleeding edge” but it may be moreso than new users need.

3 - it is does not really target new users like say Mint does though it does target GUI use

4 - I do not use it myself anymore and I do not like to recommend what I do not use. What I do use has a reputation for not being new user appropriate ( not sure I agree ).

Nothing wrong with Fedora though in my view. I would never discourage anybody from trying it.

“Fedora is Red Hat, Red Hat is mostly aimed at companies”.

I said this in another comment but Red Hat Linux used to target both the community and commercial interests. Fedora was founded to be an explicitly community distribution that was NOT aimed at companies. Red Hat then created Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ) which absolutely targets companies ( for money ). The whole point of founding the Fedora project was for it not to target companies.

Fedora release often, has short support cycles, and is hostile to commercial software. It would be a terrible choice for a business in my view. It is a leading community distribution though.

The top foundational distros that all the others are based on are Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and Arch ( and maybe SUSE — I am not European ).

In my view, Ubuntu’s best days are behind it. Fedora has never looked so good.

I use one of the other distros above but I used Fedora long ago and it treated me well. I think it is a solid choice. My impression has been that it is gaining in popularity again.

For anybody that does not know, Fedora was founded by Red Hat to be their “community” dostro. Before Fedora, there was only Red Hat Linux and it was trying to be both commercial and community. Red Hat founded Fedora to be an explicitly community distribution and then released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ). This resolved their commercial / community conflict.

Fedora is explicitly NOT an enterprise distribution. They are annoyingly committed to only free software. They release often and have short release cycles. Fedora is certainly not aimed at enterprises.

Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.

The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream. Alma has rebased onto CemtOS Stream ( which is what RHEL is also derived from ). That makes sense.

I have fewer comments on the health or future of RHEL or Red Hat itself or how much IBM. Ares about it. I guess I will say that I have never seen so many ads for it. I think revenues are at record levels. It does not feel like it is dying.

I don’t use Fedora or RHEL but Red Hat is one of the biggest contributors to Open Source. So, I hope this cynical poster is wrong. GCC, Glibc, Systemd, Xorg, Wayland, Mesa,SELinux, Podman, and the kernel would all be massively impacted by less Red Hat funding.

That teapot is orbiting somewhere. I have no idea if my universe is the one.

Saying that you “know” there is no God is an extraordinary claim. Do you demand extraordinary evidence from people that make that claim? Or do you only demand it from people following a philosophy that requires them to believe independent of evidence?

Honestly, this is about as smart as religious people demanding miracles before they will believe in Science.

If the X Elite mainline kernel support pans out, Qualcomm may become top tier in terms of support. It would certainly make them the most important Linux ARM chip. We will see.

As everybody else has said, Debian is working as intended. To respond to the actual post though, Debian is working exactly as it always has.

If you think Debian used to be good, you must really love it now. It is better than ever.

Unlike in the past, the primary drawback of Debian Stable ( old package versions ) has multiple viable solutions. Other have rightly pointed out things like the Mozilla APT package and Flatpaks. Great solutions.

My favourite solution is to install Arch via Distrobox. You can then get all the stability of Debian everywhere you need it and, anytime you need additional packages or newer packages, you can install them in the Arch distrobox. Firefox is a prime candidate. You are not going to get newer packages or a greater section than via he Arch repos / AUR ( queue Nix rebuttals ).

It is not about security at all. They do not want to test or support old browsers. So, they set a minimum version and tell you that you need to upgrade to that.

If they only support one browser, it is going to be Chrome. Chrome has more zero-day vulnerabilities than any other project I can think of. It is not about security.

It is just as easy to point to the ideas of the extreme members of the “new atheist” movement as evidence that they are a dangerous cult.

Using the Southern Baptist Church as your example of religion is not a very good argument. Implying that atheists are somehow more rational as a group is not really a great argument either.

By the way, I am an atheist. I do no consider my beliefs to be unassailable scientific conclusions though. I recognize that many of my beliefs and preferences lack the robust rational foundation I would like them to. I doubt I am the pinnacle of morality or ethics ( more than doubt - but I am not looking to trash my own reputation here ).

Voting against your own interests or scapegoating others for what you see as damage against yourself or even just plain old hate do not require religion. Humans have lots of ways at arriving at those and being manipulated into them.

I agree with you. Using religion to manipulate people for political reasons is not really a religion problem. If you eradicate religion, there are many other levers to pull. In fact, manipulating religious groups these days also requires using these other weaknesses against people and then convincing them to ignore the conflict with their religious teachings.