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 Edit for clarification: doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, just don’t want to fight with outdated dependencies if I’m compiling something from source.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?
I think your “doesn’t try to hard to be user friendly” and “not overly time consuming to maintain” are at odds with each other.
Most major distros may have a preferred DE that they focus most on, but also have releases with other options, or you can simply install what you want yourself. Don’t let the DE paint you into a corner.
From what I’ve been hearing about Debian 12, the slow release cycle isn’t as much of an issue now that flatpak is an option. It doesn’t force you into it (it’s not there out of the box), but it can allow you to have updated applications without worrying about the headaches of something like Arch with a rolling release. It’s also kind of a blank canvas to do what you want, not Arch blank, but usable out of the box, then you can go from there. Debian has 30 years of history and is independent, so it seems fairly safer to bet on. Most other distros you’ll probably look at are going to be offspring of Debian or Arch, which all seem to rise and fall in popularity over time, while those base distros keep going strong.