I’ve never died, I posit that I am the very first immortal human, there is no evidence to the contrary.

You’ll want to not use cinnamon for HDR, cinnamon is not going to get it for a very long time, KDE is a much more up to date environment and it works mostly out of the box on the most recent versions. Although I don’t think those patches have made it to mint yet.

ah, i was already a ~120wpm typist on qwerty when i switched to dvorak, so, that might have something to do with it.

I don’t have this experience, I am briefly confused for a second and then it’s fine, are you sure this lasts more than like 30 seconds?

Right, forgot about that transition.

you probably wouldn’t notice any difference between kde and lxde in this case.

it’s important to distinguish the distro and the desktop environment as two different things, lubuntu is just ubuntu with lxde installed.

Is there anything the distro could feasibly do to be a worse choice?

all you have to do is trick the user into installing something malicious, and running it.

then with x11 it can snoop on literally everything, sure, for a server linux is inherently more secure but as an end user i don’t think it matters much.

You can, but on windows it’s the standard way to do things, on linux it’s almost never done.

I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…

Like i’ve said repeatedly, it’s the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, it’s not a big deal.

here’s an example: https://xdaforums.com/c/bliss-roms.7296/

If they cannot do the work that single devs can do, then they aren’t even trying.

Single inexperienced developers do this with regularity for fun.

Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.

There’s no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedora’s whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all they’d have is DNF… Also, if this happened, redhat having marketshare would be the least of our worries. It really wouldn’t even matter.

here’s a full list of their projects: https://next.redhat.com/projects-full/

do you even use any of those?

Hell, they hardly even have DNF since they’re trying to switch to flatpak, soon they won’t even be in control of most of packaging, just the default suite of apps. This is an incredibly bad move if they’re ever going to do what you’re claiming, it’s essentially irreversible.

None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, it’s the distribution of that software that’s valuable, they package it well, but they don’t make it themselves… KDE will not go with redhat, they’re separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils aren’t made by them.

You seem to be under the impression that fedora is entirely made by redhat, this is completely false, it’s just a bunch of things other people make they’ve bundled together. Redhat does not and cannot have much power over this unless they start building massive amounts of infrastructure from scratch, which they won’t be able to justify to investors because it will, again, be entirely against their business model.

The moment fedora becomes proprietary, people will fork, switch, and never think about them again. Even if they do become proprietary through some magic, we’ll still have all the previous versions to work with, they’ll have to offer some features to make switching to the proprietary version worthwhile, and given what KDE already offers, i can’t even imagine what that would be.

They honestly probably don’t even need to fork… dnf isn’t even that good of a package manager.

True for wayland, not true at all for x11

US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left.

this isn’t even possible even if fedora got 99.9999% market share, most linux distros are passion projects, even the ones that aren’t don’t need much funding. Debian will never go away, arch will never go away, so that simply can’t happen unless they’re militaristically destroyed. You say this is not far fetched, but i’m afraid I completely disagree, that doesn’t even sound remotely possible. Fedora doesn’t even do that much, they just package together a bunch of other things that are developed completely independently of them (they don’t even make their own kernel, that’s like 90% of the work!)

fedora cannot legally become closed source, most of it is GPL licensed. Lookup “copyleft”, this is why android isn’t already proprietary.

If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!

This isn’t true, there are many open source android projects could easily keep things going. The only reason huawei does all that is because of the proprietary parts, this doesn’t exist as a problem in linux, and cannot be created as one. Firefox would still be developed without mozilla, just significantly slower. Lookup phones with microg, they have no such issues keeping things going. Browsers are a special case that require a ton of resources to keep secure, OS’s, not so much.

Also, google cannot legally close source android, that’s the point of the GPL.

Even then what you’re saying is “these aren’t viable open source projects without a lot of funding” and android absolutely is, firefox MIGHT be.

Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.

none of these concerns resemble this situation.

I know they aren’t limited to linux, but can you give me an example of a situation where this matters?

All of the situations I can think of are remedied by the fact that linux is still GPL’d

Your hatred of flatpak is probably stemming from your experience with other systems, when recommending for beginners, you must look past such biases.

Thank you, feel free to DM if you want more info on any distros or have any questions. I could go on for ages.

should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics

I agree that it’s a red flag… but in this case, I don’t think that red flag really amounts to something, just because something is a bad sign doesn’t mean it actually matters on proper analysis.

However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily).

It will always be incredibly easy to fork because they have to follow the GPL.

Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them…

Forking android is extremely easy, the part of android that they’re unable to fork is the google play store… which is proprietary. Redhat has no equivalent and if they ever made one, they’d instantly be abandoned because the whole point of their business model is being FOSS.

now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero

Literally anyone in their basement can do it, tbh, i don’t know why you think this is difficult, android is a terrible example for this since it is mostly proprietary, sure the OS itself isn’t, but google play services are the hard part, again.

That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources

No, that’s why we should favor the GPL to the MIT license, and FOSS to proprietary software.

Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master.

Except in this case their advantage is their free open source nature, which is literally the only reason the government has contracts with them.

This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.

we’re purely better off for it. librewolf exists, servo is picking up funding if you don’t like librewolf for some reason. The only reason firefox exists as a competitor is because of this antitrust situation, if we didn’t use firefox because we were concerned about this, we’d have literally nothing. It’s also a counter-example to this idea you have that forking is difficult… librewolf happened and it was easy.

BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)

I’m openly anti-military and anti-US, but I don’t think you’ve thought these arguments fully through.

I don’t understand, you’d still have to completely replace the linux kernel for a situation where this matters to occur, no?

“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition…

This would make sense if redhat had partnerships with hardware vendors and was locking down systems. They’ve never done that and there’s no evidence of a plan to. Furthermore, suffocating the competition when the competition is closed source platforms like what google is doing and microsoft is a good thing. Competition isn’t inherently good, competition is good when it does good things. In the case of completely FOSS from the ground up software, there’s no benefit to competition, it just means duplication of massive amounts of effort. If fedora started doing something shitty, there is no doubt that it would INSTANTLY be forked by hundreds of users to remove that, there’s no way for redhat to create a vendor-lockin situation the same can’t be said for windows or chromeos (yes you can technically fork chromeos but they have the software vendor locked on the hardware).

Redhat simply doesn’t have that level of control and can’t ever, unless they completely change their business model, which would also instantly make them worthless.

In other words, there’s no such thing as a redhat user, fedora is just a linux distro without any way of locking the user in to their particular distro. I’d be more worried about ubuntu trying this with snap. I challenge you going down this line of thinking to actually create a scenario where this is a problem that makes strategic sense on their part.

this applies to both open or closed software.

It could, but it doesn’t when the software isn’t vendor locked and is fully open source.

Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer.

Again, as a user, how does this matter? Do you not think the military should run FOSS software? If you’re anti-military it’s not like proprietary software won’t work there. I’d rather have the military running foss software than proprietary software personally. Somebody was going to do it anyway, what does it matter?

IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.

Yes, the US is evil, but I don’t see what that has to do with their military running libre software.

ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc… I find it concerning.

Why do you find it concerning from the perspective of using the distro? the software is still open source, and it’s not like they’re benefitting from user-count. Redhat makes its money selling support, if you don’t like their business model, simply don’t pay them for support, and you get all the benefits and none of the ethical qualms.

KDE’s new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes.

I don’t think these ethical fears are grounds enough when completely unsubstantiated to be recommending a distribution that’s fundamentally worse for beginners.

Manjaro is possibly the very worst distro of all time, famously this document details a bunch of the incredibly incompetent things they’ve done:

https://github.com/arindas/manjarno

Really there’s just no usecase for manjaro, if you want a simpler arch… use fedora. Manjaro shouldn’t exist, to be honest, i have never found a valid usecase for it. Trying to turn arch into a simple distro is a lofty goal created for absolutely no reason and they broke everything along the way repeatedly. If you insist on something arch based, use endeavoros, or just use the arch installer which isn’t that hard anymore anyway.