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 Edit for clarification: doesn't have to be bleeding edge, just don't want to fight with outdated dependencies if I'm compiling something from source.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've used Debian testing (bullseye at the time) before and it was a pretty pleasant experience. I like how much control I had over it compared to Ubuntu at least.
I like Arch and I don't have much trouble maintaining it. It's just a
yayevery now and then. The only issues I've had were upstream packages introducing drastic changes like when Nerd Fonts changed their naming scheme so I had to fix my~/.Xresourcesmanually. I use i3wm so it might not be an issue if you use some popular DE like Gnome and KDE.Have you looked into OpenSuse's Tumbleweed or Leap? They might fit the bill, but I don't have much experience using either.
I've used Debian Testing on workstations for years, it's great! Sure sometime security patches come in a little later, but it's generally not an issue.
You can integrate
debsecanwithaptand pull security updates fromexperimentalandunstableas demonstrated here, linked and recommended here.Nifty, I'd never seen that (it's pretty recent), great job Pabs & Anarcat!
Your mentioning i3 got me to thinking using a light window manager would probably go a long way to keep dependencies down and simplify maintenance.
I've been running sway on a laptop and I'm starting to get accustomed to it. Might be worth considering.
Looks like OpenSuse is sponsored by SUSE, which has an enterprise Linux product.