Are Corporate Backed Distros Good?

The guys come together to talk about whether corporate distros like Fedora, PopOS and others are good for the Linux Community.
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇
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[show notes]
bit.ly/3LMISf2
[Time Stamps]
0:00 Intro
2:26 Our Week in Foss
2:31 Josh
5:14 Steve
9:19 Tyler
13:31 Matt
20:41 Are Corporate Backed Distros Good?
1:05:33 Thingies of the Week
1:05:39 Josh Thingie
1:08:52 Steve Thingie
1:11:33 Tyler Thingie
1:16:14 Matt Thingie
1:21:20 Goodbyes

[@TheLinuxCast]

A Hoodie with :WQ on the front? Yes, we have that! shop.thelinuxcast.org

[@TheDrunkenAlcoholic]

The quote from Tyler "People make dumb decisions, doesn't matter if they are corporate or not" in regards to distro's, this is exactly why there are so many disto's, it's the other groups of people who think they are not making these dumb decisions when creating a new distro, only to find out, they also made dumb decisions, Hence why so many distro's stop being developed. its an endless loop of people making dumb decisions

[@jimmyrichards5595]

Sounds like my life. My life is an endless loop of me making dumb decisions! 😅

[@chevylization]

The biggest difference I have found between corporate and communities is the support in the forums. Corporate distros give that extra... half mile to get you there, because they really want you to use it. While on community forums elitists jump from all corners and the usual response is "google it" or "learn to use the command line."

[@The-Other-Mario]

This discussion should really have started by defining what is a corporate-backed distribution and what is a community-driven distribution. Both the NixOS foundation and the FSF are non-profit foundations, the same with the Debian Project, that are funded by donations from individuals and organizations, with the development being mainly community-driven as I understand it. Does that make these distributions closer to Red Hat, Suse, ClearLinux or Ubuntu, which are either owned or sponsored/governed by commercial corporations or are they closer to Arch, Slackware or Void which are also funded by donations but without any registered entity to manage the funding?

[@usr-noft]

Best talk in a while. Good job guys!

[@TheDrunkenAlcoholic]

Amazing Steve was running Ubuntu in the 90's when there was no internet lol, btw Ubunty first release to the public in the mid 2000's I think it was 2004-2005. I think he got confused with Redhat 4.1 which was released on a PC magazine in 1996-1997, I remember trying that myself, and we had internet in the 90's albiet 56.6k modems

[@jajunk1979]

It might be more realistic to assume Steve is full of shit.

[@warthunder1969]

It could be his memory is a bit fuzzy. Even i don't remember what distro it was my brother plopped into my CD drive back in the early 2000s. It was some form of Red Hat that's all I remember as it was before Fedora was really a thing.

[@oscs4556]

Nixos is community developed and maintained under the NixOS Foundation. People often mistake it for a corporate distribution because a lot of companies use it.

[@TheLinuxCast]

I know there’s a company somewhere doing dev work on it. Martin Wimpress works for them.

[@OpenBASED]

When Josh talks I listen.

[@skelebro9999]

29:46 Steve should be the permanent host of this podcast. Edit: Matt's face at 29:53 should be a meme.

[@siljrath]

no. yes. [steve host, no. matt meme, yes]

[@ByThisShallAllMenKnow]

Steve is on point about Manjaro. I have been using it for a short while, the updates are still decently frequent, but what he said about the mhwd is spot on! This has been a great experience. For reference, I've used Ubuntu for 2 1/2 years and Mint for 2 years.

[@sharkuel]

Manjaro is only good if you avoid the AUR. Thats what it basically breaks a Manjaro system, but their tools and repos are fantastic.

[@BG101UK]

@@sharkuel As long as you're careful with what you pick from the AUR you should be fine. I don't use many but over the past five or so years I've only had a few issues (probably unrelated to AUR packages) running Manjaro as my daily driver.

[@5Hydroxytryptophan]

​@@sharkuelEven with the AUR, it's working pretty decently.. you might rarely have problems updating AUR packages for some time, but if you wait, it will fix itself. If you consider waiting for a specific update some time as a broken system, sure that's a thing.

[@BG101UK]

01:09:00 approximately: Steve, is this "app" usable on a Linux computer, or solely on one of the Duopoly™ devices i.e. Google/Apple?

[@chrisMuc1966]

0:29 Yodelay, all 4 are on board. #VictoryFormation

[@apolopena]

In regard to voidlinux, just get your partitions right for the hardware you have and build it from the ground up, whats not to love? Start simple and then make it as complex as you need without systemd or even glibc if you want. This is the allure of Void. I love it.

[@Priimerra]

Good vid

[@zeocamo]

here i am with Steve, Manjaro just works, i got a 5 years ago install here, and just works, the only downside is, sometimes when Arch Linux update something BIG, then the AUR is now of sync, for 1-2 weeks, and we can't update/install some/few packages from the AUR, but it do NOT break the install, like Arch do all the time with grub. I Love Arch btw, it is my main driver, but in the time i got my Manjaro install, i have to fix grub i think 3 times, and reinstall 2 times on Arch, as reinstall take less then 12 mins, if the problem look like it take more time then a reinstall, USB it is time again.

[@Jeff_Seely]

I prefer supporting the smaller developer (like Steve) to big corporations, in fact I avoid them. Take every giant developer out there,i.e. MSFT, Apple, and Google.. They all have one common theme. They all have something to sell you for their revenue,which should obligate them to be loyal. But then they turn around and sell you to other companies for further profit. I don't want to be a part of that and more than I already am. Big business leads to this model and centralisation. Thanks Matt, Steve , Josh, and Tyler!

[@scummymulisha]

Google is a government intelligence agency. Microsoft is shady, because of Bill Gates and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

[@Krazy0]

31:02, green and purple fit together!

[@ollicron7397]

Distro hopping is an addiction lol.😂

[@johnstath9666]

The tropic thunder of the Linux world!

[@jamesyoung151]

Slackware was originally based on SLS. Not including SLS, every distro is based on Slackware. Slackware doesn't do anything innovate. But they do have major relevance when it comes to Linux computing, period. The second oldest distro? Debian.

[@jimmyrichards5595]

You guys left out one, at least that was here in my area of Denver. Computer City!

[@amigaworkbench720]

It's good for security and better product. But this has happen before: * you are a threat to my desktop market, take money and do this * or, hi this is government, we want you to integrate our backdoor into your product

[@bertnijhof5413]

I like the Canonical distro Ubuntu, technical competence shows in the long run. I use Ubuntu since 8.04 LTS. You don't have to agree with me, since I only have a lousy 55 years of experience as programmer, architect ('69-'11) and hobbyist ('08-'24). I have a number of Linux distros I keep in a VM, some for many years, because I appreciate them. They are Linux Mint; Zorin; Fedora; Manjaro; Peppermint a retry; Debian and OpenSUSE Leap. Manjaro is the oldest and is in the list since 2018. I dumped more than 10 distros from that list, some very sexy and popular, but after 2 or 3 problems they are out!

[@ElMartilloBlanco]

Bitwarden extension is the way. Desktop apps for that kinda stuff are overkill IMO. And if you use Firefox sync, it'll install your extensions automatically so it's one less app to install when you're making a new setup.

[@Tech-NO-City]

Dude keeps saying ubuntu canonical was the first on a graphical installer , store , etc. Mandrake Linux was doing all this in 1998 I know I bought the box copy from Wal-Mart for $20 in 1998.

[@rafaelgil6895]

Josh got confused by saying Ubuntu was the first distro with graphical installer. It wasn't, I've installed many distros with graphical installers way before Ubuntu was even a thing. For example, RedHat 6 (from 1999) already had a graphical installer.

[@rafaelgil6895]

​@@10leej No, Anaconda was introduced in 6.0.50 (the first release was probably ncurses, but 6.1 onwards were graphical for sure). It's on RedHat linux page on Wikipedia. I didn't use RH at the time, but Conectiva instead, and that also had a graphical installer since version 6, released in 2000. Also, Debian 3.0 (woody) had graphical install on 2002.

[@ChristianParpartDev]

AURs? really? PPAs? Can it be that Gentoo's portage overlays were even earlier?!?

[@siljrath]

i suggest call it "distro surfing", not "distro hopping" if it's not on daily driver, or at least on a machine being used. if it's on throw-away virtual machines, or on a no-use spare laptop, or just a dance through usb drives... it's distro surfing, not distro hopping.

[@zeocamo]

reason to go with a corp. distro, long support? no see CentOS 8, the support got cut down to end of year. IF you need a Server, and you to trust in it, something more then a play thing, Debian is the way to go... Debian is support, but there is no Corp to kill support time.

[@brianfabrizio4676]

"Balls Between Legs Linux". I think there could be something there...

[@leopard3131]

If you don't want big corporations to influence Linux contribute $ to open source projects, but they then become corporations but still developers don't code for free

[@GabrielGabeRodriguez]

Let's get this cheese!

[@JackieFuckingChan]

I love Fedora. It's my favorite OS. But I hate the Red Hat company. I wish they were cool like System76 or the OpenSUSE peeps in germany.

[@unclefester9113]

Software Develomptment is expensive and time consuming. At least Corporate Distro's are not here today and gone tomorrow. At least they're not a flash in the pan. They're more polished and far less experimental. I only install new distro's in a VM. BTW ...... Vaping is very very dumb.

[@XaverHellauer]

A really innovative community distro that you forgot to mention is Alpine Linux.

[@SprocketWatchclock]

I don't get why people always say Ohio is bad. Why has that become a trope? It's not like it's Florida, our most fucked up state.

[@mrawther]

Corporations need to make money, right? You guys need free os, free software but are against corporations making money? Why was Canonical able to push Ubuntu like no other? Because they had money. To keep doing that, they need to make money.

[@obake6290]

I don't know if "They last longer" is a good argument for corporate distros. It kind of seems like that should be the case, but the bigger community distros - Arch, Debian, Slackware - have been around for ages as well. I suppose you are right on average, just because most community distros are one man efforts that die out in a couple months. I would say the best reason to use a corporate distro is that actual money get spent on improving that distro. They have a business interest in making sure it runs a well as possible, and get new, differentiating features. Look at how much has come out of Red Hat/Fedora that we all use today. It's a lot. What new has ever come out of Debian? And the biggest reason to not use on is that they rip out basic functionality like multimedia playback or encoding. I know why they do that, but it doesn't make any better as an experience.

[@materadv0977]

First or second 🤔

[@siljrath]

the statements about ubuntu making linux easy n reliable for the first time, is grossly overstated. i was using suse linux in 2003, and its graphical installer was easier and superior to ubuntu's that came a couple years later. and suse was not the only one. at most, ubuntu was a minor improvement in ease, and a huge improvement in marketing.

[@apolopena]

Josh you are bit annoying my friend. What have they done?!? Okaaaay!!

[@pw1187]

Yep, it is good because without fedora. Linux would still be in the nineties.

[@siljrath]

mmmm, sounds good. 90s level of bloat, all out machines will run lightening fast, last long, letting us accomplish so much more.

[@jajunk1979]

Maybe the real conversation should be if users of solid distributions should stop pretending that the Linux ecosystem is anything but corporate run. If you do a deep dive into who is actually dong the work on the kernel and the desktop and all the applications commonly associated with "Linux" you will realize that without corporate sponsorship there is no Linux. Some dude in his basement spewing communism bullshit means nothing. The main players who make contributions that matter and make the needle move forward on anything of value are paid to do so. By.... You guessed it.... Corporations. The days of Linux being a subversive anti corporate stick it to the man never existed. Linux exists because talented people in corporate jobs make it so. I love these guys but jeez... The Linux community is completely delusional.

[@SearchFinger]

"Distro pollution" is one very bad thing about linux. There's really only a handful of relevant distros that should survive. The rest are just noise.

[@ghosthunter0950]

I agree and disagree at the same time. On the one hand I wouldn't want to limit things because that's often where many good overhauls come from when a more niche project succeeds but on the other hand so much effort goes to waste on unnecessary things.