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 Edit for clarification: doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, just don’t want to fight with outdated dependencies if I’m compiling something from source.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?

  • comicallycluttered@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    When it comes to Debian, you might find yourself getting more up-to-date software with the backports repo, particularly when it comes to the kernel. It’s not a large selection of packages, but there’s some useful stuff in there.

    You can also use apt pinning, but that requires maintenance and makes it fairly easy to break everything.

    Good idea might be to keep Timeshift on a decent schedule and if you mess something up, run through an older snapshot.

    Alternatively, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a good rolling release that has full integration with btrfs, so mess up an update and just boot into an old snapshot. Can also choose any DE (that’s in their repos, at least) on installation. It doesn’t require much maintenance at all. Very unlikely to break regardless.