From: Evan Leibovitch via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org>
On Wed, Jul 2, 2025 at 3:18 PM Lennart Sorensen via Talk < talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 10:24:25AM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote:
Ubuntu is an exception. Although it is derived from debian, it has way more users, mind share, and perhaps engineers. I'm not sure why Ubuntu doesn't cut the tie. Its innovations have just as often been bad as good. I do like their two update and support cycles (every six months and every two years). It is the default distro for many software projects.
Unfortunately that last point is a compelling factor. As I look around the AI-on-Linux world, it seems that developers have concentrated on "official" support for Fedora and Ubuntu and little else.
In the past, "official" support has been for RHEL and Ubuntu LTS. Vendors of kludgy stuff (not open source) wanted platform stability. That's not a phrase that I'd use to describe Fedora.
I have already encountered a situation (the AMD proprietary drivers) in which the package won't immediately install on Tuxedo but can be faked out by temporarily changing /etc/issue or the install script. Even then one must hope that any driver/kernel "enhancements" from the derivative distro do not impact installations that expect naked Ubuntu.
Those proprietary things are a kludge on the Linux distro model. No wonder there are problems. How can you (or the vendor) be sure you added kludges are reliable? They really want to run on Windows. Windows has ABIs that are stable until they are not.
I'm quite sure that SUSE, Arch and other distro communities have figured out workarounds to install many of these apps, but to me it's just one more PITA and excuse for things not working.
Another sad case of workarounds: *BSD variants. They resort to emulating Linux to get certain desktop capabilities. Note: *BSD systems are respectable but they don't have enough resources to make comfortable desktops.
I like Fedora. Mostly. It has been very good for my uses. I wish that
there were a more stable version for some of my systems. There's too much of a discontinuity between RHEL (and clones) and Fedora.
If continuity with RHEL is important ... weren't Rocky and Alma developed for just that reason?
Sorry: I meant continuity between versions of RHEL. I didn't say it, but another problem with RHEL and its clones is the lack of even a pretense of contributing code to them. I did make a few contributions through the Libreswan project. In fact, I even helped RH with customer problems (not often). I do make bug reports. Doing that right takes effort and I hope it improves the quality of distros. In the original CentOS days (before RH took them over) but reports to CentOS were pointless: all change had to be upstream. After RH took over CentOS, you could report bugs to RH, but they were really about RHEL. I have no idea about bug reports against Rocky or Alma.
I like the open source purity of Fedora but sometimes that is
uncomfortable -- much less these days.
That's exactly the same reaction I had to Debian when I tried it some years ago. I don't have an option; I have some bleeding-edge hardware that *needs* the proprietary drivers.
You had a choice: you could have not used that hardware (sending a message through the marketplace), or use that hardware on a dedicated machine. Do you think big compute farms running piles GPUs use Windows? I'm pretty sure they run Linux. And the GPU makers cater to that.
And, much as I utterly despise them, I have external needs that demand I have proprietary chat apps.
You could use that chat app in a virtual machine (Android or Windows, I guess). Bonus: that would sandbox the app.
And there's also Steam, which brings a whole new world to my desktop.
It comes with its own Linux Distro. I understand that they are moving to a more distro-agnostic approach.
I applaud any project that really really really wants to keep their own stuff FOSS. But I draw the line between encouraging users to choose FOSS and being an obstacle to the proprietary stuff. By all means suggest IRC as an alternative to Whatsapp but don' t try to FORCE me down that path.
You are reading that the wrong way. It's Whatsapp that is doing the forcing, not the distro. Or, as you did for a while, run Windows on your desktop with an enclave for Linux when useful.