This Red Hat change concerns me.

LONG: Some thoughts on what my "go to" distro pair should be.

| From: Alvin Starr via talk <talk@gtalug.org>

| On 2023-06-27 08:19, Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:

| > Yeah I am happy I switched to debian 25 years ago because Red Hat's
| > quality was so poor at the time.  Debian having a better designed
| > packaging system was a bonus.
| >
| Strangely around the same time I switched to RedHat because I got tired of
| having to apply my own security patches to the kernel and applications because
| the distribution was shipping with largely unmodified sources.
| Like many things in life "your mileage may vary".

The RHEL / CentOS / clones drama is certainly unsettling.

I don't think that Fedora is directly affected but it is hard to judge
whether there will be secondary effects.

One upcoming GTALUG talk will be from a Rocky Linux guy.  That should
be interesting.

I've already been struggling with where I want to go for a stable
system.  Besides the drama, I just don't think that RHEL's pinning
versions for 5 years is a good strategy.  Backporting for that long
feels like a wasted effort, prone to errors.

Why do I care about the effort RH puts into backporting?

- it creates a RH "moat": it prevents others from competing with them.
  Rocky, Alma, Oracle feel like clones, not creative competitors.
  That may be unfair to Oracle but that's not a company that I want
  a relationship with.

- it is labour that feels wasted.  Perhaps that labour could be used
  for more constructive purposes.

On the other hand RH has added a lot to the community and does do a
good job of beating back bugs.

I do think that I need a pair of distros: one that is up to date, and
one that is low-drama.  If they are in the same family, that cuts down
on redundant learning on my part.

- CentOS + Fedora has been a good pair for me.  TBH, CentOS has left
  me with technical debt: I get stuck on obsolete versions because the
  upgrade paths have been disrupted (twice!).  Fedora release updates
  have been good for some years.

  For my workstation (desktop and laptop) use, I've been very happy
  with Fedora, but it sure has a firehose of updates.  I don't think
  that it is affected directly by any of this.  But if a lot of people
  migrate away from Red Hat stuff, it won't likely be good for Fedora.

  It feels as if RH steers the future of Linux by making so many
  contributions.

- Ubuntu LTS + fresh Ubuntu has been pretty good.  I've had more
  problems with package updates on Ubuntu than of Fedora, but it has
  been pretty good.  Distro version upgrades have been good but not
  perfect in my modest experience.

  Canonical has repeatedly acted in ways that offend or scare me.  So
  Ubuntu, although easy, feels like a potential trap.

- debian Stable + Testing + Unstable.  I don't have much experience
  with debian.  I fear that the lack of full-time paid engineers might
  reduce the safety relative to RH (that could easily just be FUD).
  debian's goals are good by me.

So: I'm thinking of switching to debian.

I'd like to learn from others.  How do you choose to solve these
problems?  Maybe some of them are non-problems.

================

Giles has a problem with needing a stable distro with a more recent
FireFox.  I suggested, against my preferences, that this might be a
perfect use for Snaps/Flatpacks.

I wonder if I should be using a stable distro everywhere but with
containerized upgraded packages where they matter.  I yet don't think
so.

The rest of my family uses Fedora on their workstations.  But they
hate applying updates (even when I do the work).  They are way behind
most of the time.  Maybe a stable distro + a fresh FireFox would be
best for them too.

How many other packages would I need to have fresher-than-stable?

- support for newer hardware

- compilers etc.

- more pain-points would be discovered.

================

A fundamental problem is that feature changes and bug fixes are
usually mingled in upstream.  In some cases, it is a false
distinction.  Few developers want to maintain a bunch of old releases.
It is very hard for a distro to correctly separate these two, and yet
that is required to maintain a stable distro.
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